Youtube comments of John Warner (@johncrwarner).

  1. As a Sikh - I always need intro material for friends, acquaintances and students who ask and this is an excellent starter.
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  2. The fun thing is the European signs are all very similar largely because they are all signatories to the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals Knowing these helps a lot in driving in another country.
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  3. The Joint Base in Cape Cod is under 30 miles by ferry and bus from Martha's Vineyard Airport. I wonder how far the Venezuelan refugees were bussed in Texas to get to the aircraft that was used to kidnap them?
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  4. The woman who said he had a choice has she lost her job now for speaking about a non-job issue on her own time? Her own comments imply she should.
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  5. I got Google maps out to try to work out how the f%%¢ they managed to get there.
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  6. The Dutch have taken over thirty years to get to this point. They were worried about road deaths and in developing road / street planning to make them safer developed this culture. I think every country can change when they focus on reducing road accidents and deaths.
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  7. The Greek Orthodox church celebrate Christmas on 25th December in the Gregorian calendar The Russian Orthodox using the Julian calendar celebrate Christmas on 7th January in the Gregorian calendar. There is no united Orthodox Christmas. The shift to the new calendar is turning from the Patriarchate of Moscow (which supports the war) towards the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
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  8. My father used to say if you make something idiot proof then you only get idiots using it.
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  9. As a Briton who was taught to make a simnel cake by my mother It was the same as her fruit cake (yes, there is that much fruit in a British fruit cake) but with a layer of marzipan and marzipan on top So it was a "Bury style" simnel cake but I was brought up in Huddersfield not too far from Bury (about 30 miles away but culturally very distant LOL) and my mother was from Liverpool originally.
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  10. In Italy a cedro (pl. cedri) is a distinct type of citrus fruit. They sell cedrata drinks The taste of cedro fruit is distinct from standard lemon. The most famous brand is Tassoni Cedrata from Salò on Lake Garda.
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  11. The blue flag with twelve stars is the both the flag of the Council of Europe and was adopted by the EU later. The Council of Europe is a much broader organization than the EU.
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  12. I think we should refer to the laws passed in GOP controlled states as "anti-women" laws rather than "anti-abortion" laws as they are about controlling women above all.
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  13. I wonder what the airline would do if a pilot said "Allahu Akbar" over the PA?
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  14. The beauty of projective / affine geometry that the pentagonal numbers at the end video look much more reasonable when the board is rotated towards the camera.
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  15. Zundert is famous to me for being the birthplace of Vincent Van Gogh
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  16. My partner and I went on holiday to Switzerland and rented a flat in a small town It didn't have Internet and in that week I read three chunky books that I brought with me and it was a great detox.
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  17. I have voted Labour as in my constituency Labour are in second place - I think if I lived in another constituency with a different demographic I might vote Lib-Dem, Green, SNP or PC to get the Tories out.
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  18. "Prime time in the USA" is sadly prime time for sleeping in Europe so I have to wake to summaries like yours Thank you for this service.
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  19. Juan Merchan and Donald Trump are BOTH from Queens.
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  20. So the Republican Party (which officially has NO policies) is just a meme machine responding to social media trends.
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  21. It is indeed Wittgenstein's Ladder from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
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  22. The only time I have seen logs being hauled in the water was on a ferry trip from Kuopio to Savonlinna in Finland They were moving the logs through the lakes and we spent a long long time passing them. Our reward beyond going on a fabulous ferry journey was going to the opera festival in the castle at Savonlinna the following evening.
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  23. In German asifoetida is called Teufelsdreck (literally Devil's dirt) or Stinkasant (Stinking Asant) When I buy it for Indian recipies I get it in the local South Asian store and ask for "hing" which I think is the Hindi / Urdu word even though the owners are Tamils and likely have another name for it.
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  24. I remember coming to the States in 1989 and seeing the High School catch-up classes broadcast locally and being amazed how much five points of US History were emphasised War of Independence War of 1812 American Civil War First World War Second World War. I thought it was a little simplistic and unnuanced BUT... these folks were having problems with this basic schema. Oh dear.
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  25. There has been the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to attempt to overcome the worst excesses of the Electoral College system - the idea being that once enough states sign the compact and agree to apportion their electoral college voters by proportion of the voting in the state - then the electoral college will not have the problem that a state with 50.1% voting for one candidate gets 100% of the seats . Sadly for this election not enough states have signed up to it - so I think it is important to vote for local representatives at state level to ǵet things like this compact through.
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  26. The narrative that especially black children and young men are seen as bigger, more aggressive and older than their actual age is and has been a constant refrain in the racist white communities for decades if not centuries.
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  27. I believe there is a governing body called Snooker USA and it might be worth searching for their website I suspect Chicago will have Snooker tables somewhere.
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  28. Wow, the white professor seems from this to be a complete "snowflake" as she couldn't just stop the class - comment on students not putting their feet up on the chairs - waiting for compliance (which would most likely come) and then resuming - basic lecture hall management. Calling the police on this student is a) absurd and b) opens up issues of racism - that the professor is likely not to want to have to deal with.
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  29. The Andrew Neill tweet "And the moment Alex Jones knew he was no longer on air he stopped. All an act. #bbcsp." tells you all you need to know - the red light on a camera is his drug and he makes money performing.
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  30. I have a problem understanding the violently anti-halal rhetoric of these right-wing extremists. That an animal was killed while a prayer to God was said doesn't as l understand it make it unsuitable for a right-wing extremist to eat assuming they eat meat.
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  31. Yesterday I quoted the words from Brave Sir Robin (with the same alterations as you) on someone else's video. I still remember seeing that film with my mother as a double bill with Blazing Saddles and both of us laughing our head off at its satire and parody not realising it was foretelling the future.
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  32. So was Andy Warhol the grandfather of Antifa?
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  33. As Paul Gosar is trained as a dentist would you go to have an appointment with him Or would you feel you had entered the dentist scene in Marathon Man?
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  34.  @tdmprofit3708  Both churches (Russian and Greek) celebrate the birth of The Christ on 25th December. The difference is between the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
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  35. Didn't Panini use a writing system where the vowels were embedded in the script so that a "zero" needed a mark to make itself known making it visible in the writing system?
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  36. Trump does attract a lot of "low information" voters
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  37. Isn't the biggest problem that lying to the electorate isn't illegal in the USA?
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  38. The first quiz - 78% is good (for someone who isn't from the continent and hasn't done prep)
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  39.  @sem1ot1c  and making it like some folk do on two or three months though he may like feeding of alcohol every two or three weeks Where I came from (Yorkshire) we had cheese with our Christmas cake usually Wensleydale but a mature Cheddar will work
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  40. For the festive holidays I received a few books. Several I would group as philosophy books in the traditional sense of those words - «Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy» by Alain Badiou and «What is Philosophy?» by Deleuze and Guattari (which is supposed to be very tricky). I also have some books on “information management“ in a computer sense - mostly focused around computer pioneers and their thinking. This is background reading for developing a non-linear reading notes methodology / approach to reading. I am doing a reading project for my sixtieth year which ends in April 2023. For that project I am reading books published in 1962 the year of my birth. And this therefore includes some philosophy. J. L. Austin who died in 1960 had two lecture series brought to press in 1962 and the John Macquarrie translation of Heidegger's «Sein und Zeit» was published. Also a translation of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji into English (in eight volumes with parallel original text, English and modern Punjabi) so that is a little bit to work on.
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  41. The sale of VPN services will skyrocket in Utah.
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  42. The weird thing is that "laugh" becomes sinister as it continues. A laugh continued and forced like that is to me a sign of sinister intent.
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  43. Sadly Elon Musk, the salesman, made the fatal mistake of believing his own hype. We are in the Age of the Salesmen, Putin, Trump, Musk, Farage all salesmen who believe their own hype.
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  44. A salesman who has bought his own schtick is a real problem
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  45. They will be locking the doors soon!
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  46. Only going for a North Korea plus model of international isolation would overcome that carefully constructed ruling
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  47. I went to College in 1980. I encountered Reaganomics and Thatcherism in full cry. I think a lot of those people thought neoliberalism was cool. Cool doesn't have to be the majority just an influential group. I felt repelled by the cheering over inequality and still find it stomach churning. But early neoliberalism was cool in a small but influential circle before.
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  48. I did a quick Internet search on "The Hollow Venice FL" and the one I found makes its money from being a wedding venue I may have the wrong place but I would not want my wedding to subsidise a right-wing "playground" or have it interrupted by large amounts of gun fire.
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  49. I always wonder when I hear a Stalinist rewriting of history like this if there is a potential lawsuit looming
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  50. GeoGebra is great as it runs on Macs, Windows and Linux and is free to use. I did all the universal hyperbolic geometry series using this as my tool of choice.
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  51. I associate Orangina with camping holidays in France in the 1970s It wasn't common at that time in other countries but that changed over the years so at my local supermarket it is readily available and we are talking about the supermarket five minutes walk from our house which has quite a restricted range of stuff. These places are the modern version of the "Tante Emma Laden" the old mom and pop general stores in America.
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  52. One of the earliest philosophy books I read and engaged with was A. J. Ayer's "Language, Truth and Logic" at age sixteen. It was also one of the first books where I saw flaws in the argument It marked the movement from being a sponge reader to being in dialogue with the writer and I had the Penguin/Pelican edition and the margins were scrawled over because logical positivism just destroys itself with its own arguments. My first philosophy book was "The Prince" by Macchiavelli which as a thirteen year old on a camping holiday in the Malvern Hills in England with my family was a bit bored and begged for some pocket money and got given 50 pence to buy books and a comic (this was 1976 BTW) I paid 35 pence for the George Bull translation in a Penguin Classic edition and was enthralled by it.
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  53. The Nazis claimed to be defending German culture. The net result of their twelve year rule was the ending of German culture in Eastern Europe and a marked reduction in German cultural studies in Western Europe. A catastrophe
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  54. Plus the "chip pan" for home made fish and chips.
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  55. We are living in the Age of the Salesman Salesmen who think they know how to build businesses but in reality don't
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  56. I suspect the HJKL key thing is to link it with Vim users who use these keys a lot I use emacs but in EVIL mode so those keys are a natural fit for me. I suspect they wanted different keys for slide up and slide down to scrolling
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  57. In my classical Chinese class only after working through Hanfeizi and others were we allowed to work on Zhuangzi His writing is VERY difficult to understand even after I had done five years of an evening degree course in Modern Chinese and a year of Classical Chinese He is however very witty and challenging I had done earlier an exploration of Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty explicitly looking at the rise of Southern Chan Buddhism over Northern Chan Buddhism. When I read the Daoist classics I realised how strong the influence Daoist thought had on Buddhism in China Southern Chan Buddhism - being termed in Japan by the more familiar name Zen Buddhism. At the school I taught at at the end of the school year the teachers offered classes for a week in a topic other than our profession and I did an introduction to Chinese Language and Culture. I mention this as one of the sounds many Westerners have problems with is represented by the pinyin "zh" It is a retroflex sound so the tongue is curled back when it is pronounced. I had a girl in the class who said: "this sound is impossible to say" to which my colleague in the room said I replied: "a quarter of the world's population can say it, so may be you need to try a little harder"
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  58. Perhaps the French/German component for Leon came from the Norman conquest of Sicily in the early medieval times? The North African component might also stem from the Muslim conquest of Sicily too.
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  59. When I got serious about reading aged 13 I started with Machiavelli's The Prince and I set targets of finishing chapters and fortunately the chapters in The Prince are very short.
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  60. For me a commonplace book is like a written scrapbook
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  61. I haven't seen those mini cokes in Germany though I don't look for it. I imagine they are sold as mixers or at rip-off places like airports
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  62. It is interesting that Putin's name in French is "Poutine" - which is the same as the Canadian dish The etymology of the Canadían dish is suggested that it might also be connected to the English word "pudding"
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  63. Ciudad Juarez across the river is an industrial powerhouse
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  64. I remember reading a book called "Gödel's Proof" by Nagel and Newman. I bought it in Heffer's in Cambridge when I was seventeen It used the three geometries Euclidean, hyperbolic and spherical as analogies for axiomatic systems. Spherical geometry was barely mentioned but that was my only contact with it. 43 years ago.
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  65. @Tadgh78 QI has a live audience and they use the same studio as Graham Norton in London - series I was recorded in may and June and is broadcast this autumn on the BBC.
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  66. Using Beckian logic (imagine the chalkboard). Republican Peter King supports Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin is in the European Parliament. In the European Parliament they group with the European United Left/Nordic Green Left. Other parties in the European United Left/Nordic Green Left include the Parti Communiste Francais, Die Linke and Vasemmistoliitto - one is a communist party and the other two contain parties which were the communist parties of Germany and Finland. So Rep King is a communist! QED
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  67. Barbour was the first “monetarist“ chancellor in this current period of what is called the neoliberal period. He is often overlooked as he ploughed the British economy into the ground. Thatcher who drove the manufacturing sector into the ground and caused three recessions is remembered more fondly by folks as she had a successful war and sold off the Georgian silver and used the tax revenue from North Sea oil to pay for her wealth redistribution from the poorest to the wealthiest.
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  68. One thing that struck me when reading the Walshe translations was how "intellectually funny" his sermons were Humour is not something that survives well especially on the written page but his sermons often contain the two parts that make a joke first a narrative that leads thinking in one direction followed by a switch to a different direction often deeper and more profound. BTW did you know that Walshe, THE translator into English was a Buddhist and translated some of the Buddhist scriptures too.
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  69. Could you connect the dots here - I don't see the connections.
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  70. I am with Ana on the animatronic Hall of Presidents They are creepy and should not exist.
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  71. I graduated from the children's library to the adult library when I was about eleven or twelve I was a bit of a precocious reader I wasn't terribly interested in fiction so I spent a lot of time in the languages learning section and in the same area was philosophy so I moved to the philosophy of language reading people like J. L. Austin as well as Russell and moving not randomly but like a network out and ended up reading the Kaufmann translations of Nietzsche and as a teenager loving them.
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  72. I remember the first time I saw Larry King Live - I was shocked by the softball questioning that Larry delivered up. I am used to seeing things like Sir Robin Day having a politician walk out in the "here today - gone tomorrow" question and Jeremy Paxman and Michael Howard interview on Newsnight ( watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI ). They are serious interviews with politicians. This was softball questioning and she fluffed it big time.
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  73.  Seeyou Seemee  The Ecumenical Patriarchate is in Greek called “Οἰκουμενικὸν Πατριαρχεῖον Κωνσταντινουπόλεως“ (Oikoumenikón Patriarkhíon Konstantinoupóleo) and in Turkish “Rum Ortodoks Patrikhanesi, İstanbul Ekümenik Patrikhanesi“ (Roman Orthodox Patriarchate, Ecumenical Patriarchate of Istanbul) and in English it is known as “The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople“ - more in line with the Greek version. The Patriarch is styled the “Archbishop of Constantinople and New Rome“
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  74.  @Robalogot  I fear that a) Schiphol International Airport is a source of foreigners coming to look at Amsterdam b) Amsterdam has better PR than Ghent / Gent / Gand - or as it was known in Medieval times Gaunt (as in John of Gaunt).
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  75.  @autohmae  I think there is certainly some resistance to that in the Netherlands
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  76. This one which I have travelled around because of the trees etc makes it easier than other ones like the one in Swindon where the island in the middle was smaller and barren - which made it less easy, in my opinion.
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  77. Downloading for listening to later.
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  78. The 17 August 1945 date is like 4 July 1776 is to the USA. It is the day they both declared independence from their colonizers. This is the date they celebrate but in both cases they still had to fight a war against the colonizers. 1949 for Indonesia is like 03 September 1783 when the British and Americans signed the Treaty of Paris.
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  79. Saint Nicholas the Wonder Worker as he is known in the Orthodox Church (I know this as the local Russian Orthodox Church was named after him) was from Myra in Greek speaking Asia Minor (now called Demre on the SW coast of Turkey) He was a bishop in the 3rd century CE So the modern "Santa" is much more cultural appropriation than a black Santa.
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  80. A few things chimed with me in this video 1) as a student I often took breaks from problems I was working on Quantum Mechanical analysis of chemical reactions and often needed to take breaks and just accept that that was how it was. Two side notes on this: a) I always had a regular sleeping schedule even when I had a work crisis b) I kept and still keep paper and pen by my bed as I have "solved" some problems and woken up and written them down. 2) in my masters course - I ended up doing a lot of finding mistakes in papers I unofficially called my master's thesis - finding and recovering from typos 3) As the equivalent of a US high school teacher in Britain I introduced a lot of students to calculus and it was and is fascinating to what what the triggers for the ideas to click I developed an armoury of approaches to everything from early calculus to long multiplication so there was no single method to do something.
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  81. Guiliani's tweet isn't aimed at everyone even though it is visible to everyone, he is tweeting to the folks in Individual_1's base and a lot of them do not care whether he has spelt names correctly nor car whether he has actually been in the US Senate or not - he is selling mood music to say Lindsey Graham is right to lose his rag - the spelling mistakes help direct the tweet to those who lean towards his position already.
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  82. I like the name for the late 17th century to the mid to late 18th century as the Second Hundred Years War It is a rather Eurocentric name but there was continual rivalry / war / raiding going on in North America as the French and English / British jockeyed for power. The different strategies of the French and English / British to the various Eastern Native Tribes and the English / British Colonists approaches over time are interesting.
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  83. My first laptop was a black and white screen i486 which was my workhorse until its power card blew and the chip was no longer available.
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  84. The question presumably is "HOW do you get out of the "dumpster fire"?"
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  85. I find it interesting the arguments that the "intellectual" Jordan Peterson makes. We started where Jordan Peterson claimed that someone has no right to decide their pronouns and "she" made a name through that absurd and hateful idea. Now "she" gets to decide on no evidence whatsoever that others are looking for child porn. Unfortunately when you turn "her" arguments on "her" it makes "her" look stupid. BTW as Jordan Peterson says "she" doesn't control "her" own pronouns by extension to "her" deadnaming trans folk. I will describe "her" with the pronouns "she" / "her" (quotes included).
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  86. When I studied Classical Chinese, as part of an evening part-time degree course in Chinese Language and Literature, we read a lot of Hanfeizi, who was a legalist political philosopher / thinker, the Chinese was crisp and clear, though his philosophy was very authoritarian. I would thoroughly recommend reading some legalist thinkers, and counterbalance it with some Confucian thinkers. The Daoists are the anarchists of the Chinese world who challenge your thoughts on self, state etc. I never read The Hobbit myself my mother read it to me as a bedtime read As she was a trained Kindergarten teacher she used to do all the voices etc. I was spellbound.
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  87. According to Wikipedia, that bastion of leftie wokism - NOT, When John Mackey was starting out with Whole Foods in Austin Texas: "On May 25, 1981, the most damaging flood in 70 years devastated Austin. Whole Foods' inventory was ruined, and most of the equipment was damaged. The loss was approximately $400,000 and Whole Foods Market had no insurance. Customers, neighbors, and staff assisted to repair and clean up the damage. Creditors, vendors and investors assisted the recovery, and the store reopened 28 days later." That sounds like socialism to me his company should have gone under and he would not have the wealth he had. But he probably now pretends that he did it all himself. The myth of the self-made man one of the central lies of the neoliberal worldview.
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  88. Aslan is the lion in the Narnia stories and stood in for Jesus hence the name
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  89. “Tr*mp in pumps“ nice rhyme.
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  90. I changed my diet to a whole food plant based diet with no added salt, oil or processed sugars. Eating to fullness and retraining my taste buds helped me lose over 40 kg (~90 pounds) going from 120 kg (~260 pounds) to 80 kg (~170 pounds). This way of eating is cheaper and not as dependent drugs and health insurance. When I started I was on three diabetes medications. I dropped one quickly and the other two are on half dose. So cheaper all-around.
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  91. I suspect like most folks commenting here I am not someone who is enamoured of the "floating Petri dishes" as my partner and I call them. The nearest I have been to a cruise is using long ferries on the Baltic to cross from Germany (where we live) to Norway - so a 20 hour crossing with a cabin. My feeling is probably similar to my feelings about theme parks. I worked as a Youth Leader for a young group and they chose a trip to go to a theme park I had to go along and it was so weird as there was nowhere where you could get away from the sound of people enjoying themselves (and I tried hard). The other analogy I thought of was of the British holiday camp - started in the 1930s and they were mass holiday locations where you paid for bed and board and enjoyed nobbly knee competitions and beautiful baby competitions My own holidaying usually involves me going mostly to urban centres in Europe mostly by train or ferry. and learning and using some language with the locals. Even our one centre holidays - which we are taking more and more is that we organise trips out by train, tram or boat. To me cruise ships with 10 000 other people is like hell on Earth. I used to say that my vision of hell was travelling on an endless Autobahn on a coach with school children where they all wanted to go to the toilet but there were no rest stops. I might need to revise that to being trapped on a cruise ship with people who didn't want to do anything but lounge around.
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  92. Have you thought about taking the minimalist aesthetic further and design the garden as a permaculture no-dig garden or a food forest?
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  93. Indian food stores are great for getting things like jaggary - here in Bielefeld, Germany we have a local Indian store run by Tamils and they have an amazing range of goods - I also get my harina P.A.N. which I use to make arepas.
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  94. Often folks forget that "the plural of the word anecdote is not data"
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  95. Let us hope there is no Rose Mary Woods to erase crucial parts of the tapes.
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  96. All my grandparents who were born around 1900 in Britain played whist and I think until the development of TV it was quite popular to go to "whist drives" social events where whist was played.
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  97. In "Yes, Minister", a British political comedy from the 1980s, they said there was an irregular verb We are freedom fighters You are guerillas They are terrorists This is a sums up the approach of many right-wingers.
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  98. When I went to Beijing for a 1 month course after studying Chinese for five years at an evening degree course in London. The Chinese were often surprised that a foreigner could speak Chinese and went to obscure museums like 北京鲁迅博物馆 Beijing Lu Xun Museum (I think I was the only non-Chinese there) but it is where Lu Xun wrote 野草 one of my favourite pieces by him and one I did a presentation in class on. I occasionally was the subject of interest and often addressed in English and also Russian My Russian was "I don't speak Russian, I am English" which weirds folks out as apparently I have an almost native accent LOL I did get stared at a lot in China
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  99. A friend of mine thirty plus years ago invented the portmanteau word for folks like these right-wing extremists in America The word was "mimophant" They have the sensitivity of a mimosa but trample on others like an elephant.
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  100. But she's Dr Kandiss Taylor... admittedly she got it from Regent University
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  101. Doesn't Rush Limbaugh live in Palm Beach, Florida? So I assume he is staying put and not doing any defensive work on his property for when Irma hits...
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  102. Germany might be an interesting test case as it is a federal country with sixteen separate states and a federal government which often has to negotiate over policy etc. It was designed by British and American lawyers after world war two and is sort of what they thought their governments should be like.
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  103. Reisebüro Behrens is a German tour company so the bus is likely full of German tourists LOL
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  104. As corporations are people, all gas companies should be in jail without parole as criminals have used gas for their crimes. I await the execution of a gas corporation in Texas LOL
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  105. In the McLibel case in London it became apparent that the anti-McDonald's group was being infiltrated by McDonald's and at one meeting there were, I think, only spies in the room.
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  106. Brasseye was a British satirical programme and they got people to condemn a "new" drug called "cake" and they got celebrities to condemn this new drug - painfully funny to watch and this pedobear thing has similar characteristics.
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  107.  @arturobianco848  Though there has been advocacy for fifty years or so to me the key changes in government policy were the SWOV report "Naar een duurzaam veilig wegverkeer" (Towards sustainably safe road traffic) in 1992 and its adoption by the Dutch government over the following years. Just for context I remember going on holiday in the Netherlands in the late 1970s with my family and the Netherlands being a car-priority place where you parked on the central market square like many other European cities but that is no longer the case.
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  108.  @autohmae  The sense of their road safety policy is perhaps best described as a refusal to blame the victim. They view mandatory bike helmets as putting responsibility on the cyclist rather than the vehicle driver who hits them. I think it is a discussion point in the Netherlands at the moment but to be honest my Dutch language skills aren't that great so my knowledge of the current debate is limited.
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  109. Can I recommend watching some how to pour beer especially the European ones as they can produce a lot of head and it isn't the way most beers are sold.
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  110. Here in Germany because of our history we are very averse to referendums like the ones that the current owner and CEO of Twitter is conducting THey were a tool in our history of the far right to get what they wanted with a veneer of popular support.
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  111. The analysis that "wokeness" allows people to avoid policy is a helpful one and a point to raise when anyone goes off on a "wokeness rant".
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  112. The requirement for "allegedly" in all news reports from now on is the aim of the lawsuit.
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  113. Have you ever seen the 1986 advert by "The Guardian" called "The Guardian's 1986 'Points of view' advert" It takes the same events from three different perspectives and tells three different visual versions of the story and it sums up these folks They have edited the stories they tell to make political propaganda.
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  114. I loved the pronunciation of "cretin" as the same as "Cretan" - is that a US thing?
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  115. and the Family Research Council (of which Rekers was a founding member) has wiped him from the record completely.
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  116. Congratulations
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  117. When I hear about ABBA I think of this parody video featuring Rowan Atkinson early on in his career: https://youtu.be/wYkxvU66c3s
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  118. Interestingly The Telegraph and The Daily Mail both had YouTube clips of the audible booing with no commentary except for the titles of the video.
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  119.  @kathygallegos2502  But the racist extremist right who Tucker Carson panders to want to believe Ciudad Juarez is a $#!†hole so their racist narratives can continue to be believe.
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  120. The Swiss have 5 CHF coins (they are worth over 5 USD!) and usually coins are not accepted at foreign exchange when I go to Switzerland I try to avoid ending up with 5 Swiss Franc coins asa they stack up quickly and you are stuck with them until you visit Switzerland again.
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  121. The poem was written after a failed invasion of Canada by USA which started the War of 1812.
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  122. Gram flour uncooked is disgusting but is pleasant cooked. Asafoetida is used as a garlic / onion substitute in India - the sulphur compounds change to milder forms with heat.
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  123. I was born in Britain in the North East of England and the biggest deep water fishing ports were in our area (or more precisely in our regional television news area) so I remember the "Cod Wars" of the 1970s The Icelandic Coastguard also developed cutting devices to cut the nets of the trawlers I don't believe they did it often as there is a great deal of danger in doing it for personnel on both ships. Weirdly where I grew up we tended to eat Haddock and Chips rather than Cod and Chips which was associated with the south of England. We didn't go to the chippy but cooked it at home and had it at least once a week -deep fried haddock in a beer batter and thick chips
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  124. Saying that - makes me think that Greene didn't mean it and knows it too.
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  125. He was Richard Rich in a Man for All Seasons in 1966, Timothy Evans in 10 Rillington Place 1971, Quentin Crisp in the Naked Civil Servant 1975, Caligula in I, Claudius 1976, Kane in Alien 1979 and the Elephant Man in 1980 and has done many more roles since then - brilliant speech and well done his wife for suggesting it.
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  126. The Victorians had "vinegar" valentines so it is nothing new.
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  127. Like the fourth statue in Trafalgar Square London where there is an empty plinth but no statue Perhaps your audience can suggest an eighth book? I would suggest The Prince by Machiavelli short, carefully constructed and even though it doesn't represent his own thinking it is a well crafted argument. The Discourses by Machiavelli is a more worked out book but "you cannot read it in one day".
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  128. I believe that children are some of the best question askers on the planet I use the term "question askers" as it expresses a broader area than just philosophy (some argue that philosophy is all but I think its academic version is more narrow) I have met brilliant theologians brilliant scientists brilliant philosophers mostly in the age range 3 to 7 They ask the best questions. I for many years was responsible for the Children's Class at a Quaker Meeting (with, in the Quaker way, a committee) and I was seen as a brave class leader as I raised theological issues and used Bible stories. My favourite was the Book of Ruth where we spent an entire session exploring the first verse of the book: "In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons." We had an excellent discussion of famine, migration and moving - all while migrating across the room and having to make decisions about what to keep and what to discard.
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  129. It reminded me so much of the 1991 film Bob Roberts and their parody music videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zY5d1kpJFE That was over thirty years ago
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  130. After seeing you use it last week - I had a look at it - and have it as standard for my PDF reader and ePUB file reader too. I use the poppler PDF add-on as I need to print and the muPDF version doesn't allow printing.
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  131.  @TheSpikehere  I had forgotten about Iain Macleod as he was in post for a month and ill for a lot of that time. I really only remember Barbour as I was only eight when the conservatives came to power in 1970 and only started reading newspapers in 1972/3 as things started to go wrong.
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  132.  @TheSpikehere  My memories of 1970 are more of going to see The Merchant of Venice with Judi Dench and Polly James (from The Liver Birds on TV) It was my first Shakespeare play and I still remember the set and the acting.
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  133. As I don't use processed sugar - I think upping the dates and using them to sweeten the porridge might work.
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  134. A new version of the "Conch Game"?
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  135. And the guy at Breitbart doesn't care because he has moved on to making other unfounded allegations against other people.
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  136. As a teacher in a school in the late 1980s - the dinner ladies always offered me was cheese salad - grated cheddar cheese and anaemic lettuce, cucumber and tomato. Eventually I trained them to offer a range of vegetarian food.
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  137. I bought a new computer in 2000 and it came with Windows Me It was such a horrible experience and led to several crashes that I moved permanently to Linux and haven't looked back since then. My partner's computer ran Windows XP and we talked about what happens when it came to the end of its support life and we moved to Linux I use Arch based distros with i3wm my partner who is less technical uses a Linux Mint LTS It works and I can ssh into the other computers from termux on my phone if necessary too.
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  138. I read Dune in 1978 when I was sixteen - it was stunning and powerful - though I think the religious material dominated in my mind but rereading it later - I see the ecological story more - it is a classic tale that can be read in so many ways.
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  139. I found the interesting thing was when I retired with lots of "free time" but my reading routine was disrupted significantly and I discovered I had been doing a lot of reading on my commute from home to work and it was very productive reading too. I had to rebuild my reading schedule which I had not expected. Being in hospital was a trigger to start using my eReader and I now use it for novels and continuously flowing texts. If I am learning something or it is a tricky or novel text I, like you, prefer a physical book. I did an experiment with different media, in a project to read texts associated with my birth year, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote and published three novels in his Perry Mason series, I read one in physical form one on my eReader and the third as an audiobook. I didn't feel a difference between the eReader and physical form but the audiobook - sent me to sleep and I had to keep replying sections to get even the gist of the story. So until my eyesight becomes very problematic I don't think audiobooks will even be a primary source of consuming texts. I use a command line journal programme called jrnl to make quick notes and have a tiddlywiki set up as a Zettelkasten à la Niklas Luhmann (BTW his actual Zettelkasten - lots of index cards is held by the University of Bielefeld and was part of an exhibition at the Art Gallery called "Serendipity" where stochastic methods were used in art and thinking.)
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  140. Sadly the former pastor will serve an incredibly short period of “punishment“ and then will be “forgiven“ and will be back peddling hatred.
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  141. I was on a catamaran ferry between Denmark and Sweden and I was sat behind two people one was a Swede and another a Dane and they spoke in English to each other. Their native languages are fairly close and their written forms are very close. But speaking a "neutral" language like English is more acceptable.
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  142. I didn't know about Hank Williams Jr before this incident and I will have forgotten him very quickly - I felt the incoherent answer at the end was actually because he was thinking of the n-word as the "enemy" and changed track.
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  143. @Tadgh78 It is live and sometimes the audience get points for getting the right answer. Few if any British televeision programmes have laughter tracks - though a lot of American ones seem to - the sitcom programmes especially. When they are dubbed into German they are awful to watch.
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  144. After being cancelled twice from the Proms in 1997 and 2001 - it is nice to know this fabulous piece of music is being played at the Proms this year.
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  145. Amusingly the options the YouTube Algorithm offered me after this video were: - your video on Shankara and Advaita Vedanta - a video by a Swami on "What is Vedanta?" - your video on Marguerite Porete - a video on the Antykythera Mechanism - a Stanford University lecture on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - your "What Religion Do I Practice?" Not sure what that tells me about my viewing or what YouTube thinks I would like LOL
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  146. My partner and I went on holiday to Switzerland and we had a rental flat and it had no television, it had radio and about ten CDs - most importantly it had no internet access. I had brought three weighty tomes which in the week we were there - I finished - my partner didn't bring any books so I lent him one of mine which he enjoyed. When we needed to book a hotel for the next stage in advance on the Internet I went with my then netbook and hovered round the railway station and got a free signal and did the biz.
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  147. I wonder how the "relaxation" of discipline in the religious society of Friends in the UK in the nineteenth century can be explained as it led at least at the time to a rise in the numbers - mostly be stemming the tide of people being read out of their meetings. Is this a twentieth century phenomenon?
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  148. Didn't Senator Susan Collins say that Trump would learn his lesson from trying to extort President Zelinskyy where he said the Ukrainians needed to find dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for the aid previously agreed That doesn't seem to have worked.
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  149. In the late Weimar Republic of Germany 90 to 95 years ago there were paramilitary gangs and they tore Germany apart and there were a lot of cases where the police or officials were partisan mostly for the extreme right Germany and the world paid the price for that and it needs to be nipped in the bud now before it is too late.
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  150. The former president and Judge Juan Merchan BOTH come from Queens LOL
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  151. Here in Germany he would be in the right-wing of our conservative party and is certainly to the right of Angela Merkel. So calling Obama a conservative makes perfect sense in a European context.
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  152. It still amazes me that a culture that developed a robust investigative journalistic tradition and exported it to the world now has a craven media that goes "yes, sir", "no, ma'am" and I fear it is because the media operations are money making operations and are fearful of not being granted access to the elite if they don't ask softball questions. I remember being shocked when I first saw CNN and Larry King interviewing someone It was billed as hardcore but the morning hosts on European breakfast television would give the person a harder time.
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  153. I remember in my first classes in Quantum theory (aged fifteen or sixteen) We were introduced to de Boglie's idea And I asked if that meant that Position and momentum Were traded off with each other It seemed so obvious to me I think de Broglie idea in his thesis Is often forgotten as the things Built on the idea are seen as The keys to the kingdom.
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  154. Why do I keep thinking of The Handmaid's Tale with these right-wing legal theories?
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  155. I think you can skip countries and come back to them later That helps.
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  156. "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." Archimedes was a real person who was killed in the seige of Syracuse in the second Punic War. He knew his mathematics and science and added to our knowledge unlike George Will seems to have done.
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  157. I have to say this is shaping up to be like "The Great Disappointment" in 1844 when William Miller predicted the second coming and it failed to happen. There was disillusionment and fracturing of the group that had believed Will an analogous process happen after 13 August?
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  158. Aren't they just trying to whip up a storm like they did with Acorn in 2009 to get Planned Parenthood down? Throw mud at them hoping some of it sticks.
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  159. The UK original of the House of Cards is superb too - I recommend it and it is over twenty years old.
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  160. Always nice to have an alternative.
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  161. have you read one of the current health care bills? Reading five different versions of a bill which will be voted on in parts by the two Houses would be stupid. The fact the US Congress currently has five versions floating around is really wasteful - that seems to make the process of lawmaking harder.
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  162. I will have to stop watching your videos as I now have two new philosophers to explore Elizabeth Anderson and Nick Bostrom (Nicklas Boström in Swedish) I think that is enough from one video! I think a short YouTube film of Nick Bostrom's Pascal's Mugging might be interesting to do. My first encounters with philosophy in literature were with Tom Stoppard and his plays which explored a lot of the Analytic Philosophical scene of Britain and North America at the time.
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  163. Just to go off at a tangent - in Britain they did some research and found that being called into see a senior police officer and told off had more effect than prison on teenagers and so we swapped to that. She needs a severe talking too and all her classmates need to know what she did.
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  164. American foreign policy flip flops from beating foreigners over the head followed by people who try to build links. The Republican rhetoric is frightening.
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  165. I had never noticed that before - just an example of the changes in language that are constantly going on. It perhaps shows a decline in the understanding of Latin, influence of other languages etc. I cannot as a teacher of English decry it - I am intrigued by it.
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  166. Calling someone a pedophile or a "danger to children" with no evidence and maliciously in a public forum is basically libel - and her occupation as a teacher in a position of trust with children makes her much more vulnerable to this sort of libel and as he said it as well in public, slander. Whether UK libel / slander laws are too tightly drawn as it is the location of choice to bring these sorts of cases is a different matter but under the law he was libelous and should be fined.
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  167. Weirdly I think his biggest mistake was getting elected - like an inverse version of The Candidate (1972) he was supposed to lose and it has been a series of "now what?" scenarios and money grabbing since.
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  168. 300°F is about 150°C and 175°C is more like 350°F which confuses me, could you clarify?
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  169. Louis nailed it there - there is a strong strain in the right-wing culture that believe they are in a Hollywood world or a video game world where the good guys who are wearing the white hats always win and get the girl in the end.
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  170. I read Dune about 45 years ago I bought it in a bookshop on the way home from school I found my first attempt to read it hard and gave up then a year later I tried again and finished it and enjoyed it It was one of the first "tough" world-building reads I tried and I wasn't prepared for the "alien-ness" of the worlds built. That was definitely the biggest stumbling block Also I wanted to understand everything in the novel the way you can with say an Asimov novel (which is largely what I had been reading up until then) It is more grown-up and coming back just a year later helped me at least.
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  171. My first Shakespeare play in 1971 when I was nine years old was The Merchant of Venice with Judi Dench as Portia and Michael Williams and being very confused that Judi Dench and Michael kissed at the curtain call. I think they had recently married or were about to marry.
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  172. @danjorgen - sadly Carly Fiorina comes with a lot of baggage and has just allowed this advertisement to be aired in public even if it is only over the Internet. This advert alone might be enough to sink her as a serious politician. I however have no experience of what plays well with the republicans in California - not sure the sheep on a pedistal will endear them to her.
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  173. And the cure for people like Beck who want attention is to put them out on the naughty step with the two year olds.
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  174. Compare that to the "Spanish shower" a phrase used in Britain to describe using a can of deodorant under the arms to be "clean"
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  175.  @tdmprofit3708  I believe in orthodox theology Sunday is the eighth day of the week.
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  176. @Michael Kopischke The Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church still mutually recognize each other, I believe. There is a history of Orthodox churches changing to which patriarchale they look.
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  177. So you see ad hominem attacks as a substitute for analysis of the constitutional role of the president in the USA? What do you really think - you can use scatological, profane and homophobic language to describe your views on the role of the president in the US constitution.
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  178. Good to see this. I was born in 1962 so for my sixtieth birthday year I decided to read books from 1962. So I read the "Androcles and the Lion" in Shavian and later in the year read Jane Austen's 𐑐𐑮𐑲𐑛 𐑯 𐑐𐑮𐑧𐑡𐑵𐑛𐑦𐑕 I trained up to do it by taking a word list of the 200 most common words in English in Shavian and making flashcards real ones not an electronic set and memorising them. That helped tremendously in speeding my reading.
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  179. There are two problems with the American occupation of Iraq. First: the training of the soldiers to kill - not to pacify - American troops continued to shoot first and ask questions after - oops. Second: I think they thought they were in a Hollywood movie - an action movie where the good guys (the US) might have to do some nasty things but they will win and shot dead the baddies at the end of the film. You never see the aftermath in a film of all the dead and mayhem.
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  180. I met this first in Lewis Caroll Epstein's book "Relativity Visualised" - which I read as a teenager when studying physics as a recommended extra item.
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  181. In a sexist society - you could interpret more female anchors implies that the concept of anchor is being devalued - that society does not value it.
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  182. I was intrigued that the title talks of tech billionaires and the commentary talks of "brightest minds" Not sure those two are the same thing!
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  183. glad to say I have not heard of them and I am glad I will never have to watch or even acknowledged these people - phew - isn't it great living in Germany.
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  184. When I visited Baltimore in 1989 - I walked from the station to my sister's apartment - and some of my sister's American friends were so shocked that I had walked through the black area of town. They thought I would be mugged or attacked - the paranoia in the white community even well educated "liberal" Americans was frightening to me.
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  185. I remember when I first encountered highlighter pens they were newish on the market I basically highlighted everything in a book I then realised that it was technique rather than technology that helped reading and in this case remembering.
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  186. The hall of non-presidents is the Adlai Stevenson Room.
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  187. Sadly Tony Martin had actually laid traps for burglars and when he shot the two burglars while they were running away - he didn't kill them - he wounded them - one escaped and got treatment. He left the other guy and did not report this to the police so the second guy died. Tony Martin plea that he had a paranoid personality disorder was accepted and he got a reduced sentence of manslaughter through diminished responsibility. Not a great posterboy for the failure of the UK legal system.
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  188. rewriting history and especially their own history is one of the signs of a totalitarian mindset - sort of 1984esque - the key to stopping this is an open and independent media - News Corp starts a story somewhere and then spreads it etc. Then their operatives change their tune and deplore what they once applauded.
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  189. @busapp Can you provide the figures to justify that statement.
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  190. I believe Mr O'Leary is what is called a media personality - he seems to have been within CBC hired as a loudmouthed entrepreneur - for programmes like Dragon's Den etc. He regularly gets into hot water for his on air statements and has definitely drunk the Kool-Aid. His aggressive barking style is destroyed by calm delivery. He has to defend is insults by saying I didn't call you a nutcase I called you a nutbar LOL
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  191.  @dimrrider9133  There was advocacy in the seventies certainly but government policy, planning and design priorities changed after the 1992 report by SWOV called: "Naar een duurzaam veilig wegverkeer" (Towards sustainably safe road traffic) hence my reference to thirty years.
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  192.  @arturobianco848  I remember Marco te Brömmelstroet's book "Movement" giving some history but I was looking for it over the weekend and cannot find it at the moment. I currently have a book-mageddon at my house as I am reorganizing the library.
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  193.  @photovincent  And Utrecht filled in its canal / moat in the 1970s
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  194. Yes the US has laws about owning television channels - only US citizens can do so so he became an American citizen in 1985 and started Fox in 1986. It was a commercial decision.
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  195. I believe Luxembourg went for free transport country-wide but it really is just the City of Luxembourg and surrounding countryside A lot of their office workers commute in from Germany, France and Belgium and the city cannot cope with the traffic.
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  196. I have a strong feeling it was poor research mix with a cynical disregard for the readers - the bus thing and the book faux-pas are part of the same thing. The sound bite is the thing and "drill, baby, drill" is a great soundbite.
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  197. I suspect Glenn Beck's demographics are old white people - he thus uses the tools of the evangelical preacher and feeds into the latent fear of change, the fear of the young and the fear of the black people - it is interesting and frightening to watch.
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  198. Bachmann versus Palin - now that is a race to the stupid.
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  199. @Jill1994A So you are a racist homophobe who doesn't seem to be able to cope with reality so makes stuff up and trolls channels like this. It is a sad world and as you have no evidence - you merely look stupid as well as racist and homophobic.
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  200. Channel 4 News in Britain is a highly regarded news organisation - I recommend you digging out the Jon Snow Alistair Campbell interview over the dodgy dossier on the Iraq war. Do American politicians get grilled like this.
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  201. The problem with his statement was that he did not qualify what he said - and as a politician he has to be careful in how he says things and slightly infuriatingly his own example was something he as head of the executive branch of California seems to have failed at. The interesting thing was that he compared a system where it is providing health care and health care insurance reform - they are not the same things.
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  202. The point of the court case was that the prisoner A was suing to have the sexual reassignment surgery as she (and she legally is recognised as a she) was denied it by the prison authorities refusing to transfer her. She used article 8 of the European Human Rights Convention (right to privacy and family life) to challenge the refusal to move her from a male prison to a female prison so the gender reassignment can be completed. I suspect the British Government will appeal this decision.
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  203. Sorry if I confused you - your comment suggested that rates of offending had to do with population size was wrong and had nothing to do with sentencing policy. I am agnostic about the sentencing policy of the UK - the guidelines for sentencing for manslaughter are laid out in the 2005 by the Sentencing Guidelines Council which was set up by Act of Parliament in 2003. Shorter sentences are more to do with the liberalism of their society and the view of what prison is about than size of country.
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  204. and your evidence for your assertion is what?
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  205. There have like trains been first and second class citizens and the question has to be which class do you abolish to make a better society. I know people who would abolish first class but I would instead abolish second class. First class for everyone.
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  206. So the news feed from HQ in Rockefeller Center to Fox News and Glenn Beck's earpiece.
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  207. So you advocate the breaking of the law?
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  208. My mother's parents were born around the turn of the 19th and 2oth centuries and lived through the "Spanish Flu" pandemic and my 91 year old mother says that she didn't remember them mentioning it. So not sure it will impact us for long.
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  209. The father wasn't there so it is hearsay evidence and irrelevant. They are making it worse for George Zimmerman by coming on television and doing this for his "defence"
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  210. I did an evening degree course in the Chinese Language and Culture and I remember being fascinated by late Qing foreign relations where they went from their model in the eighteenth century to dealing with a series of calamities and encroachments by European powers and internal strife They had to accept the European models witnessed by the joining of international bodies like the Universal Postal Union etc.
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  211. "How could you prove it?" stains on the dress?
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  212. @1969pontiac1 So imagine the black voters have a choice between Obama and a republican candidate - the likely effect is not that they will vote for the republican as he or she will not do anything for them and so they are most likely to stay away from the polls. I suspect you underestimate the negative effect of the tea-party endorsed candidate - they are not likely to go to the middle to pick up the votes they need to win.
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  213. @calvinhobbesliker2 I am not sure he did - he was in the 1890s - a very proud subject of the British Empire and that is why he was shocked by his treatment in South Africa - not in London where he studied. But when he went to South Africa to practice as a lawyer and found that he was treated as a second class citizen (the blacks there were in third class). His techniques of civil disobedience were honed in South Africa. He continued to use technology to spread his message all his life.
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  214. @ethosflux I agree your original statement was written from ignorance and prejudice. I am confused by you part sentence starting "Unlike ... spain." this should either be attached to the preceding or the following sentence but it is nonsense as it is not a complete sentence. First Canada has been involved in several wars since 1949 when the Federal Republic of Germany was formed.
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  215. @dangerouslytalented Sadly the American no win no fee system doesn't allow for principled law-suits like that. Giving the money to the lawyers and a gay charity might be the second best option.
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  216. I agree they are subjective and the test used by the US constitution for good and bad legislation is the vote of the people. When voting for a representative I vote also for his team and the party line - the control of the party in US politics is a lot lower than many other countries because their constitutions are later and generally have moved to a more parliamentary model not an eighteenth century monarch and parliament model as the US uses.
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  217. Kilmeade is very ignorant - the bit that was most interesting was the bit about Swedes marrying other Swedes and Finns marrying other Finns - this shows ignorance of the basic components of these societies - a mixture of Sami, Finn and Swede in both countries so they are not pure. The Swedish royal family is French as well - and there is no law unlike what Kilmeade thinks of marriage purity in Sweden or Finland. They are modern European societies that are part of the EU.
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  218. So they have opened themselves up to a law suit for Christian bias LOL
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  219. It isn't his money he is burning He isn't wasn't that liquid so he borrowed money from others so it is not good for them either.
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  220. @Steve197201 doesn't independent mean not affiliated to any party - I thought thewrefore there would be conservatives who are not registered Republicans, and also liberals who are not registered Democrats - the independents are not registered for a particular party - but they come in all hues. Or have I misunderstood the term?
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  221. Ron Paul does not care about his chances of success beyond his seat in the house.
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  222. Teaching in the equivalent of a High School in Britain The first lesson with the new intake (13 year olds) involved a go around the group about what they think about mathematics and a lot of people always said "it is difficult" and many other negative things. As the first theme of the course was "squares and cubes" we then explored what the definition of a square was where I would be the scribe / group facilitator as well as the questioner of ideas. By the end we had a class definition of what a square was that we could all use. I am not sure they understood they had been "doing mathematics" but they had. My favourite experience was when two parents came to the parents evening and complained that I was making their daughter have to think like an undergraduate. She had enjoyed mathematics in her previous school as she could plough through lots of the scheme and complete lots of booklets´. I wanted her to think and problem solve. I said that if she wanted to do book work I could provide it and give her support and I did do that. She was within two weeks preferring the material in my class to the books even with my support. I always argued that mathematics was so hard because it is so simple, when I was at school I did mathematics and physics and found the mathematics classes were about a year behind the physics because the physicists assumed so much stuff about the nature of the things they were manipulating
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  223. The classic "if" apology - if x is offensive to y then I apologise. where y is "some people", "others" etc. First - it says you do not see this as something you should apologise for Second - implies that the person is right and the people who are offended are not me, my kind or my listeners here. Third - don't you just want to stand up and say that was offensive to me - so he has to apologise properly.
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  224. The weird shit is called applying the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms agreed by European States in 1950 after the horrors of the Second World War. It is a partner to the UN declaration which is not enforceable whereas the European Convention is enforceable and in the UK can be enforceable by UK courts. The prisoner in question took a case to court based on that and won.
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  225. If he was running as "town crier" I might vote for him - but for treasurer of a county - can I phone the realtor now? What worries me is that has a Masters in communication - he also seemed to have five or six degrees - I suspect that is two degrees with major and minor and second minor - because he ain't the brightest tool in the box.
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  226.  @karlk9316  It might have been less BUT it might have been further in mileage So that if a 30 mile trip is deportation in the same state. Then Texas / Florida "deported" them with the bus journey alone. I was pointing out the hypocrisy of Cancun Cruz.
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  227.  @Tony-723  Not heard of kidnap by inveiglement? Might be worth checking it out.
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  228.  @bipl8989  I think they stopped in NC too but I might be wrong.
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  229. I also remember the Heath experiment with monetarism in the early 1970s and the Wilson / Callaghan continuation of monetarist policies in the late 1970s. I also remember the unemployment figures going from one million (considered a disaster in 1979) to 3 million four years later and that was caused by the "medicine" Nanny Thatcher gave the UK.
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  230. Retiring helped me and having to do caring for my handicapped partner I have a lot of dead time so I fill it with books. Not being in what I call the "American mindset" I am a European I am glad I have not had the culture that I must read more and faster to claim the prize of having read so much. My reading is varied and I definitely avoid the BookTubers who read a load of books for quantitative reasons. I hit sixty this year and so I decided to do a project of reading books / texts published in, awarded a prize or translated into English in 1962. My #1962project started in hospital this year and have been collecting and reading some interesting stuff. My favourite in terms of memorability and impact was Eugène Ionesco's "Le roi se meurt" (known in English as "Exit the King") My mother is 92 years old and slowly dying and this work is about dying is funny and philosophical and had strong observational tendencies too. I read it in French and have also purchased Ionesco's "Notes et contre-notes" some of his theoretical writing also published in 1962.
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  231. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad
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  232. The difference between a theist one who believes in a God who interacts with the world and deist who believes in a creator God who then withdraws - the effect is that of atheism.
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  233.  @1369Stiles  Having lived in British English milieu for most of my life and rarely using the word "cretin" in a US English milieu I had never heard this version of the pronunciation of "cretin" It is most akin to some place names like the River Thames which in Connecticut is pronounced one way and in London is pronounced another. The thing is that the same spelling is pronounced differently is more noticeable than the same word pronounced the same but spelt (British English joke there) differently.
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  234.  @louisejohnson6057  Having lived in the British English world and taught English to non-native speakers I had not heard the homophones "cretin" and "Cretan". I suspect that this comes from the US variants of the English language. I have to say I spell Aluminium and pronounce it with the extra i in it but the location of dialects which pronounce words in a particular way is interesting.
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  235.  @1369Stiles  Not sure I would call myself “cultured“ - I do like to collect pronunciations as it helps teaching non-native speakers to understand spoken English. I merely expressed my ignorance (is that a mark of “culture“ in your book?) and interest in the geographical spread of this pronunciation.
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  236. Had Trotter not read Screen's two volume biography of Mannerheim - which was published before Trotter published his Winter War?
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  237. I still remember a BBC reporter going to see an American right-wing evangelical preacher and exploring with him what he believed it was ten minute interview - probably edited from a much longer piece and the preacher showed his ignorance and his bizarre beliefs etc. He condemned himself but a rolling news programme is not the place to interview a guy like that. I want to understand where he is coming from it is an alien world to me and most Americans, I suspect. He will condemn himself.
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  238. That explains the non sequitors and the bad spelling LOL
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  239. Thoroughly Modern Millie was made in 1967 with Julie Andrews - so it is hardly a super old movie LOL
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  240. I live in Germany too and I have to say that until this year I had never heard of the idea of a medical bankruptcy - I have lived in four European countries and it is just unheard of for this to happen. But it is socialised medicine of course in all those countries.
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  241. @xxashyy so by that criterion do you want to see the Tebow and Focus on the Family ad? I think the mancrush company saw an opportunity to make massive amounts of publicity to them and to make CBS look hypocritical and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. All this free publicity.
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  242. via their mouths and through their stomachs and guts - like everyone else.
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  243. It will be interesting to see how it plays in the polls as 47% is a lot of people to alienate in an election.
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  244. I like her because she is so stupid it makes my brain hurt trying to think down to her level of dumbness.
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  245. In the Netherlands there are people who fill the speed cameras with foam. The sort that expands and sets rock hard. Much better than shooting randomly at a comers and missing.
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  246. I think if some of these clowns get in the use of candles would go up - look at the deregulation of electricity in California and the resulting poor service. More candles needed there.
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  247. The interesting thing about this case is that the school superintendent was at the revival meeting and saw nothing wrong with the school bus turning up after the boys were told they were going to an motivational speaker and a free steak dinner. The other interesting thing is the report that the school required students to have a note signed by their parents before they would let them watch the President of the United States on Tuesday. WTF!?!
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  248. Newt Gingrich who has a problem with ethics - first he spells it "moneymaking" LOL
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  249. The maximum determinate sentence in Norway that can be given is 21 years. However there is a provision for an indeterminate sentence, initially limited at 21 years and with parole eligibility after a mandatory 10 years confinement. The parole board can decide that the prisoner is a continuing danger to society and extend the inmate's sentence by five years at a time. This could theoretically result in a whole life sentence if the prisoner was never deemed safe for release.
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  250. This case should have been a minor back page story in a local paper of a vigilante shooting and murder. The saddest thing is the amount of pressure that needed to be placed on the prosecution authorities to actually act.
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  251. As the body charged with reviewing legislation are the SCOTUS Justices not supposed to have actually READ the law they are considering? Antonin Scalia comes across as an ignorant buffoon withthis sort of partisan lie.
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  252. As Scarborough was in the House and will have the political beef with the Republican Party apparatchiks who are still there.
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  253. As an outside observer (I am a European and live in Europe) it seems to me that at present the right-wing commentators seem to be the ones who tell the bigger lies but that might be part of the bias of being a European where the sort of "news" that say Fox News produces is not present.
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  254. Thankfully I was in China in the 1990s so people didn't have smartphones and though because I have a beard and hairy legs and 1.90 m tall - I stood out and folks did talked about me. It was funny when I talked to them in Chinese with a Beijing accent LOL
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  255. So you will be around for a very very long time then.
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  256. I am in hope that the "lecturing" part of teaching being done by AI - freeing the teacher and classroom space for doing the problem solving and discussion part of the role.
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  257.  @spankyssurprise1361  Is that a problem?
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  258. But the lie told often enough becomes the "truth" that is what he is doing - selling a lie so people think - the Sierra Club is the villain of the piece and if he is challenged on this he says - well it was only entertainment / comedy not fact but the meme is out.
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  259. @jaba987 - I was challenging the idea that people are less willing to take a bribe because they are rich and the assumption that the wealthy will be more honorable. I am not convinced and there is an interesting example in Europe where the Italian members of parliament are highly paid so they are less dependent on the organized crime and that has singularly failed. Corruption is also about attitudes and the chances of getting caught.
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  260. Karen Handel is a political entryist - and a cancer on the Komen Foundation. She needs to be excised from the organisation before she kills it.
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  261. I think the summit is a slightly different position - that game is to make it clear that the republicans are the party of no and have nothing to offer. If they accept they have to accept that something is going to happen and if not they look childish like a toddler saying no. But there is an interesting point about Rahm Emanuel who is definitely sitting on his hands.
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  262. Shifting the debate to the right or the left is a well worn tool that politicians like to use. Reagan was famous not so much for policies but for shifting the agenda rightward in the USA and the Western world. Margaret Thatcher in the UK also did that too. I find the characterisation of some views that in Western Europe are taken as mainstream and supported by all the main parties are in the US media's terms radical leftwing and dangerous.
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  263. His audience was his own district which I am sure has a virtually non-existent muslim population and Fox "News" who can use it as a sound bite as if it is news.
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  264. @blackkakari Hey that is rude about 13 year olds LOL
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  265. @Zakdayak It is not my thinking it is Daniel Kahneman who did research at Princeton on this and it is in Kahneman's book "Thinking, fast and slow" and I recommend it as an interesting read.
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  266.  @obtuse1291  Some sections certainly
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  267. The UK murder rate is not that low medium for Europe but highish for developed western European countries - we just tend to do it with knives (or as the statistics quaintly puts it "with a sharp object"). The gun murder rate is incredibly low and that is due to the very strict gun ownership laws in the UK following what were perceived as unacceptable massacres.
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  268. My favourite bit was when Begala made a comment about the Reagan administration and she says "I wasn't born yet" - weird way to say it and as Begala said - I wasn't born at the time of the French revolution but I know about it.
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  269. I do hope he takes it to court as I would like to see them try ans prosecute it.
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  270. They (the Republicans) have a 19th century view of the deserving and the undeserving poor. It is a spurious and malicious idea which outside their world is useless.
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  271. I suspect the conservatives know in their heart of hearts that having people educated - is bad for them as when people get educated they are less likely to be bigoted and have knee-jerk reactions. And Sesame Street teaches children not to hate each other and that is not on the conservative agenda either LOL
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  272. @ethosflux My apologies - I understand you are Canadian - I usually get "nah nah what about the second world war" type comments from citizens of the USA. Mind you the Canadian Government has been involved in killing more people than the German Government since 1949 as well - you were in Korea and Iraq.
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  273. @berny88925 Are you suggesting that he has no knowledge and has not authorized the RonPaul and the RepRonPaul twitter accounts. That is weak as he either cannot control things in his campaign - what does that mean if he gets into office - he will not be responsible for the executive branch as he is not personally in every office doing the task - it makes a poor case for a chief executive. Rep Ron Paul is an interesting representative and has some interesting policies but he is not a president.
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  274. The concept of servant leadership is so key to my personal philosophy since I was introduced to Robert K. Greenleaf's thinking in the 1980s. I think however you were cruel to douche nozzles in comparing Ted Cruz to one.
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  275. Ron Paul has sufficiently interesting policies to be a member of Congress but he should not be let near the levers of power which he can exercise or not alone.
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  276. You have to realise that the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual sex in France is fifteen and has been so for thirty years so this is a nobrainer for France.
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  277. Different people need different numbers of rolls to get a single roll Yahtzee - what are the most likely number of attempts and what is the distribution of numbers - I was wondering here about how would you know someone was more likely cheating in claiming to get a one-roll Yahtzee etc.
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  278. The Czechs can thank Jan Hus (1370 - 1415) for his reforms which are the basis for the current orthography. Jan Hus was an interest person and an early church reformer who was executed at the Council of Constance in 1415 after his free passage was rescinded and he was tried for heresy. His followers still survive as the Moravian Church. Czech is quite straight forward in spelling compared to Polish which had , I believe, FOUR reformations none of which stuck LOL.
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  279. "Oh dear, not again" as the bowl of petunias said when it feel onto the planet Magrathea.
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  280. If you want to see hardcore cycling in the Winter Oulu in Finland near the Arctic Circle has all-year cycling and there is a BBC World Service report on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URMQ0d286hY Enjoy!
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  281. @brandonmcr3 "You mean Champagne, the region of France to the Southeast of Paris?" - the Champagne wine growing area is centred on Rheims as far as I remember and Rheims although East of Paris is certainly North of it - so probably safer to say that the Champagne Wine Region is East of Paris. There is an administrative region of France called Champagne-Ardenne and as the Ardenne is bordering on Belgium the centre of that entity is also NE of Paris.
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  282. The Californians need to sort their forms of government out - the system seems not create a nightmare for the administrators - they have money for the building but do they have money to staff and run it.
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  283. Seamus is an Irish name and pronounced by Mr Heaney and many others ˈʃeɪməs (in the International Phonetic Alphabet) which approximates to shaymus
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  284. Hossó makes personal attacks on Alastair Campbell and then when he points out she's effectively a politician with a failed policy - she says - she doesn't like the "personal attacks" - I fear she is a mimophant - she likes dishing it out but cannot accept it back. https://youtu.be/vBu7jkuEUS8
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  285. As I have no idea who the guy is this story though interesting is basically a story of a man who waits tables and lives off the grid because he can't afford to be on the grid.
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  286. @gr1283 Agreed grandpa Cenk is well out of his depth - Ana really shines here.
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  287. Cenk - this is a common misconception amongst most non-British people but the language of describing the countries of the British Isles is not so straightforward. British Isles = United Kingdom + Republic of Ireland United Kingdom = England and Wales + Scotland + Northern Ireland England and Wales as they were merged (by force) in 1536 is a single territory - with special laws for Wales and the Welsh language. Please talk about attacks on Britain not England - England is not a legal entity.
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  288. I have never studied Japanese but I did an evening degree course in Chinese and on my Summer School in Beijing with my 1 300 characters I could communicate and understand a lot of the signs in characters. I have to say I find the role Kanji (hanzi) play in Japanese weird as a kanji character can have a meaning - like the Chinese character or it can be a phonetic component from another Japanese synonym Plus Japanese syntax is much more alien than Chinese. As this was before computers or smartphones I had thousands of A8 flashcards with the chinese character on one side and an English translation on the other LOL (because writing them by hand helps memory too!)
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  289. This case is shocking and the assumptions by Zimmerman and also the police are more like those of white people in the 1960s than the 2010s.
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  290. Fascinating video which like a good book I stopped at several points to reflect on and in my case explain something to my partner who was not watching There was so much in this video I will likely watch this again as it has given me several ideas points of departure in thinking.
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  291. Jayar hits the nail on the head when he says "if you want to know what the right are up to look at what they are accusing liberals of".
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  292.  @50jakecs  And those that hoped to become so.
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  293. First youtube updates views relatively slowly so the figures don't match - second from a quick scan of the comments (where more than one can be written by some one has watched the video once) there is a bit of trolling going on with inflammatory remarks.
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  294. I just think of the fable of the oak and the reed by de la Fontane and I think that Republican foreign policy is like the oak that breaks and Democratic Party foreign policy may be more like the reed.
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  295. The Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 is an interesting act as it was codified after the Yvonne Fletcher case when she was shot from the Libyan embassy premises but law officers could not act as it was diplomatic premises. Removing diplomatic status is a serious and has never been done since the passing of the act as far as I am aware and the opinion would be out cannot be done and meet the international legal requirements. Interesting bluster by the UK Government.
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  296.  @paulweaver7074  Not sure I did. The "confusion" is more evident in French. Putin is literally "cheesy fries with gravy" in French.
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  297.  @paulweaver7074  TYT's approach did seem to indicate a lack of knowledge of French and the French transliteration of the Russian head of state's name "Путин" as "Poutine" rather than the English "Putin" Living in Germany and knowing several major European languages (and a few minor ones too) means that I see many transliterations or forms of names that a monolingual speaker would not. Their broader point that "fries, gravy and cheese" isn't something you'd confuse with "Путин" is still valid.
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  298. How would it play out if a) the former president got money from a foreign source b) won in November and became president again in 2025. How would the Foreign Emollients Clause operate?
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  299. Didn't some of his string and weight models of buildings survive? Inverted eerie and haunting
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  300. If you worked 2 x 8 hr shifts every day of the year. They would earn 42 340 USD a year on a minimum wage of 7.25 USD per hour. So to earn the extra 57 660 USD and assuming they get 10% tips on each order - they would have to serve 576 600 USD of orders. I would be happy to employ someone bringing in that much business for me.
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  301. Interestingly I think the problem with Glenn Beck is that he can never be proved to be wrong as his world view is unfalsifiable. That is the problem - his view is to me wrong but he thinks he is always right even when he is wrong.
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  302. It seems brendan1994ca that you prove the old adage that it takes one to know one.
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  303. The "logic" is that the weapon of choice of the conservatives in all countries is based in FEAR - he wants people to be fearful as then they will vote for them. It sometimes works but with Beck it is turning into the boy who cried wolf.
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  304. Very Aristotelian of you.
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  305. Perhaps because he is a US citizen who was brought up and educated in the US?
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  306. Just when you thought the case against “George Santos“ couldn't get worse...
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  307. President Bush had no interest in finding Osama Bin Laden as he was more use as a hate figure to scare the American people than as a dead has-been.
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  308. That is cruel to Sir Les Patterson!
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  309. I had purchased an eReader in a sale at my local bookstore but didn't really use it. Then I had a bad flare up of my autoimmune disease called myasthenia gravis and was hospitalised for two weeks plus. My eReader saved my reading life as l couldn't hold a big physical book. I was however able to hold my eReader in my hand and with my mobile phone download new books onto it.
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  310. I have just added a "Quotes" to my tiddlywiki called "readingNotes" and I like to put one quote and attribution on the each tiddler. The first stage however is using my electronic notepad that my mother got for me and writing it in long hand then transferring it to my tiddlywiki. I was getting my disabled partner up a few days ago and the sky was grey. I quoted outloud Theodor Storm's poem "Die graue Stadt am graue Meer" and it struck me. So I added it to my tiidlywiki and got a eBook of all of Theodor Storm's poetry. This chimes with my study of Chinese Classical poetry. etc. I mix "commonplace" book ideas with reading notes and get ideas and projects going.
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  311. In my Zettelkasten (I use an open source electronic system called Tiddlywiki) and I write out things in my "quotes" and they are just listed alphabetically and it functions as my commonplace book. As I read physical books mostly I cannot copy and paste texts I even write out Chinese, Greek and Punjabi quotes and I do that on my smartphone which has multiple keyboards.
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  312. You mean the people born there who are citizens? So you think they are racists? Never!
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  313. But in the world of Beckian mathematics - it was 4000 Buses and they each take 5000 people in each bus LOL
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  314. My grandmother was once sick in the back of a bus - does that make me an expert on transport?
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  315. I was planning on putting an arch linux version on a raspberry pi4 and I like i3wm So I thought I would look up some i3 versions and kept coming across sway versions instead. I am going to try this version on my rpi4 to see what happens I use the rpi4 for browsing and running emacs and editing my reading tiddlywiki a non-linear notetaking app which runs in nodejs.
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  316. The power of the idea of "Czars" is the mixing of the concept of "totalitarian", "overbearing", "despot" and "Russian" - it is not the truth of it but the association of these concepts with President Obama and his administration. If you say the president has too many policy advisers - we would think it a normal piece of small government rhetoric - and something you can debate etc. "Stop the Czars" is much more powerful at all levels.
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  317. But Cenk hasn't realise that Judge Napolitano actually is a time traveller who actually comes from the year 2036 and he forget to reset his watch LOL
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  318. This is part of an irregular verb: We are freedom fighters You are guerillas They are terrorists (Thanks to Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn)
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  319. I use note cards for the first level of note taking and then move them to a Tiddlywiki with added backlinks Technically not a Zettelkasten method even though Niklas Luhmann lived and worked in my town and even has a tram named after him. I have built a huge set of links between items and with my personal reading which as a retired teacher is to quote Zhuangzi 逍遥游 "wandering without a destination" (though Zhuangzi is notorious for being very hard to translate) The Tiddlywiki is a great tool as it enables me so far to build an interesting collection of cards even going beyond my project x reminds me of y reminds me of z etc. I also do sketchnote responses to poetry too I haven't integrated that yet but it is possible with Tiddlywiki. BTW Tiddlywiki is open source and runs on my smartphone on an open source emulator - and is backed up to my cloud.
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  320. BTW seven years ago the local art gallery Kunsthalle Bielefeld had an exhibition called "Serendipity - Vom Glück des Findens" "Serendipity - the luck of finding" and the ground floor exhibition was part of Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten This was my first introduction to this form of note taking.
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  321. Liz Trotta should read the Handmaid's Tale where Serena Joy, the former televangelist, is in this dystopian novel, is on the world she creates forced to sit at home doing nothing.
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  322. I suspect that they are suggesting a very classical economic tax called a Pigou tax. The tax does two things makes the object more expensive to buy thus you buy less and paying for the cost to society of the item being consumed. In fact it is not a nanny state.
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  323. The other interesting paper on this apart from Lakoff's book is by Prasad, Perrin, Bezila, Hoffman, Kindleberger, Manturuk, and Smith Powers and called "There Must Be a Reason": Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification.
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  324. @phoenix1985 My point is that in the USA he appears sensible, coherent and mainstream in the UK he was considered a disgrace to journalism - it tells me a lot about where America is in comparison to the UK and Europe.
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  325. When I first learnt about the first stage of Quantum Theory and de Boglie's work and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in 1977 our teacher without doing the mathematics in depth used the Fourier transform explanation and it is the one that stuck in my head especially understanding the HUP
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  326. I worked for a data recovery company between 1997 to 2003 and we made a killing assisting companies getting Y2K ready.
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  327. I like /liked Thunar mostly because of the bulk renaming functions until I found yazi which has a great bulk renamer which opens in your default text editor in my case NeoVim and then I can change the file names as if they are a file then you get at the end to decide whether the renaming goes ahead. For Mr Clumsy-Fingers (i.e. me) that is a God-send. So I use yazi most of the time and occasionally use Thunar.
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  328. When abortion was illegal in the Republic of Ireland - women came to the UK to have abortions - all Kansas is doing is making women fly to states where they can get an abortion - it would likely be cheaper than doing the three day waiting period and to be honest there is no reason to trust a doctor in Kansas if this bill is passed. So I would advise women to leave Kansas in that situation especially as the doctor may or may not be lying to you. That is truly criminal.
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  329. LOL Kim Jong-Il being born under a double rainbow - firstly you can never be under a rainbow as it is a visual object where the sun is behind you and the light strikes the rain at 42 degrees approximately - this can only happen when the rain is in front of you so the the rainbow appears in front of you too. Oh dear next story...
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  330. I thought the idea of the newly nascent USA was not to have a standing army but to have citizen militia. This idea collapsed very quickly.
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  331. I don't dispute your figures but I suspect there are some huge payments to provide health care to the uninsured and the poor and providing things that in most western states are provided by the state. The other thing is in that 300 billion USD how much is religious funding as there are a lot of churches in the USA touting for business.
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  332. Have you ever read William Morris' "News from Nowhere" - as it definitely is in praise of small technology in the words of "Uncle Ted".
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  333. When I moved to Doom Emacs I installed ripgrep and fd and I had encountered paru (you had done a recent video on it) which is written in Rust bat certainly looks better as does procs (though procs isn't compatible with aarach64 architecture sadly) so my Raspberry Pi Media computer cannot take it.
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  334. Having problems with numbered lists which I was hoping you'd cover. I am experimenting with Groff to format my recipes and the ingredients are unnumbered - they are fine - the method I number so I did it by hand for my experiment but is there a sneaky method for this? I used ".IP /<number>" which is not terribly efficient.
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  335. upon what do you base your accusations. They appear racist and homophobic not nice traits in anyone.
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  336. To be a member of the European Union a country has to abolish the death penalty - and Germany has it in the Federal Constitution that the death penalty is abolished - that is part of the original 1949 constitution. There is something barbaric about the life for a life idea in USA legal thinking.
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  337. Isn't the correct response to Individual_1 for these lies "you would say that anyway"?
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  338. The income tax was enabled by the 16th amendment in 1913 that is 20 years before FDR came to power and the new deal and there had been earlier forms of income tax as well.
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  339. It will be interesting to see how it performs at Malmö. The UK seem to have gone for more established singer-stars in recent years - but without success - I think it probably depends on doing tours of countries and actually marketing the song to especially Eastern Europe.
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  340. Kudos to anyone who suggested that Orly Taitz would be caught in a sex scandal - if a right-wing politician starts to take the moral high ground you can guarantee that the skeletons will be dancing out of the cupboard fairly quickly. I had not figured on Orly Taitz to be enmeshed in a sex scandal as well.
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  341. Fascinating to know the history of gerrymandering in the various states of the USA.
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  342. I thought I heard he said "bought make-up at Bloomingdales to update her 'slutty' flight attendant look" she was not called slutty - personally I think flight attendants should sue for being compared to Sarah Palin (this is also a joke)
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  343. I am confused as you have written a response to my comment about Cenk Uygur's use of the word " we" which does not follow the thread of Cenk's background - Mr Buchanan's lack of morality in your view is a separate point better made in a separate comment.
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  344. It was interesting going round museums in Estonia around the turn of the millennium as some had been revamped after the fall of the Soviet Union and others were still in Soviet mode. The Soviet style museums were to me the most interesting as the ideology was to me more clear and easy to discern.
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  345. I think there is an issue with tasers and police officers - they incidents of using tasers has grown and the problem with the taser is that is the sales point that it is non-lethal and I actually think the solution was there in the video clip - making police fill out forms as if they had used a gun and these incidents will disappear which I think we all want to happen.
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  346. I think the House has to preserve its own honor and Representative Wilson was disrespectful of the House and the President. He then refuses to apologise for his behavior in the House. Either they look weak and don't censure him or they do censure him. The problem is the partisan nature of the speaker's role - it is a partisan position but that weakens the House's ability to penalise bad behavior. If the speaker was neutral and impartial - then they would be in a position to pounce on the idiot.
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  347. She is wearing the standard uniform for Fox News - the female presenters wear incredibly short skirts so they would all be expelled by the university if they turned up like that.
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  348. like in the blurb for the videos and on their website where there is always a link.
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  349. I prefer physical books, music CDs and film DVDs. I have a Tolino which is linked to my local German book seller.
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  350. The interesting comparison is Canada where the gun ownership is on a par with the USA yet their murder rates are much more European - as is their whole approach to politics.
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  351. Is the in video advert an extra dig at the former president? LOL
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  352. Is the caller now part of the "loony left" as he called in and was on LBC?
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  353. Good job - and you are very entertaining With respect to the right-wing press barons - I was reminded of the line from Citizen Kane: "You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."
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  354. The interesting question is why do these "savvy" billionaires keep pouring money into these scams? Surely there are better ways to spend your money than funding the lifestyles of the like of Dick Armey.
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  355. The "win" was about what evidence could be used.
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  356. When I studied Chinese - I took a class in Classical Chinese and we started with Hanfeizi as the language is more straightforward - though the philosophy isn't very attractive. We eventually graduated to Zhuangzi which was fascinating but very VERY difficult and we needed the commentaries written by scholars in Chinese over history to help people who were reading Zhuangzi to get some insights from the texts.
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  357. Is not the modern American presidency not a collaborative effort - and the question that is being raised is who is Obama's favorite at court - the answer probably is Rahm Emanuel. But he is certainly not the only person in the room helping the decision making going on. The question of how decisions are being made inside the kitchen cabinet of the US Presidency is an interesting question but will not be fully answered until the memoires are written.
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  358. It is useful for checking you have entered the digits correctly in the calculator.
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  359. The paper is called "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior" and is by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) - an interesting read.
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  360. As Texas has a fast growing Hispanic population and it will be the largest ethnic group in about 2020 and will have an absolute majority within 20 years of that - it would be interesting to see Texas as a separate state - it might well rejoin Mexico especially as the oil is running out.
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  361. Governor Brownback does not seem to know about the Streisand effect - this young lady had 66 followers on Twitter yet now I know what she wrote and think less of the governor as a result.
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  362. Do it with big signs that spell out messages - it would be funny and witty and that is generally what the conservatives lack.
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  363. @berny88925 His campaign is selling him to the American people and everything he says, does or his campaign says or does is under scrutiny. Would you expect less of any candidate? I have no problem with him being a representative as I like to see a plurality of opinion in the house and senate. But he seems to be run by the campaign rather than run the campaign and that seems dangerous - almost like the bush/CHENEY presidency where the size of the print tells you were the power was.
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  364. Glenn Beck has said he does no research, he checks no facts, he is a self-declared "rodeo clown" and apparently doesn't rehearse (the latter comes from the clips of the show I have seen and heard).
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  365. So mentioning Hitler nullifies the current German and British states - Are they supposed to be under his influence still - that is not an argument. You originally argued that gun regulation would mean that the feds would have complete control - I offered current Germany and United Kingdom - you counter with a piece of propagandised history - gun control was never a reason Hitler got to be a mass murdering fuckhead - it was never even an issue in Nazi Germany.
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  366. I was always though that parsnips were a crucial part of medieval English peasant cuisine at least I think I was told that at school as a basis for many dishes These were replaced after the discovery of the Americas with the potato. I wonder how true this was?
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  367. I agree that the firearm rates are lower - I misremembered some data - I think to say it is "gang related" is to say it is not a communal responsibility though and I think there are problems in US society which favour the idea of shooting as the solution and those need to be addressed.
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  368. @bohemianwriter1 The medieval history of the British Isles is of wars between the Scots and English - invasions both ways, the Welsh and the English - mostly the English invading and the Irish and the English. The domination of the British Isles was formalised in the various "Acts of Union" - the Welsh under a "Welsh" King, the Scots under a "Scottish" Queen, and the Irish under a "German" King.
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  369. The interesting question is how many of each number came up. The statistics of number spaghetti could be interesting.
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  370. the priest will be reassigned to something or given training and ejected into the world. He might have to spend six months in a monastery somewhere but it is not fired in the conventional sense usually.
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  371. So what did this cost the City government to stage and how much will it cost the citizens of that city when all the law cases are over?
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  372. Do you think that the right-wing voters would notice the switch as the town-hall thugs are using these as talking points for weeks and have been called on it.
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  373. Indeed the unAmerican meme is a strong one in US society - I think it needs exploring - it has a longer history than the anti-communist witch-trials of the 1950s. For a culture that claims to love freedom there is an awful lot of conformity in the society too.
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  374. It is sometimes useful with names like Peugeot and Stihl to click the little loudspeaker symbol on wikipedia to hear someone say the name Often there is at least one anglophone pronunciation and sometimes a native version - it is interesting. BTW when I speak English to British or American English speakers I usually say EYE- key-a but when speaking to Germans in German I say it without the initial dipthong more like an English pronunciation of the fifth letter "e". Speaking to non-native speakers of English in English I use the Swedish pronunciation. I saw Lego in images on your screen but you didn't mention them an interesting Danish company and the name comes from the Danish Leg godt meaning play well.
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  375. The function that motivates conservatives is the function of fear. They fear everything and they want us all to share their fear. We must refuse their fear.
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  376. The mother's reasoning was interesting - she was using the reasoning of a child - she kicked me therefore I hit her back - she assumes an equality of motivations and actions that is not there. If a 1 yr old kicks you - it is not like an adult deliberately kicking you - it could be an accident as intention from a baby which is pre-lingual is impossible to know - the law assumes innocence and so should this mother.
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  377. I studied in Beijing as part of my Chinese language course - and I came back with a string Beijing accent LOL
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  378. Otherwise his own brain would attack him.
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  379. They writers of this mathematics textbook are allying the religious right with the traditional mathematics in the mathematics war that has been raging in schools and colleges for twenty years in the USA.
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  380. Well given that Garcia's racist stance - being of immigrant stock and being non-European are very relevant in this case. It is slightly worse than Csanad Szegedi who was a prominent member of the Hungarian Jobbik Party who espoused anti-semitic views and was vehement in them until he found out he himself was Jewish himself and had lost relatives in the holocaust. Haley knows the views of this man and still appoints him.
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  381. The interesting thing is that Shep Smith is now seen as the "hero" of Fox News and the only person with balance. He seems from my little exposure to Fox News to be what I would term "right of center" in the political spectrum so Fox has managed to make someone who is to the right but not as right as other presenters appear to be a champion of balance - that is the power of Fox News - they have wrenched the agenda so far to the right.
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  382. I, when I lived near London, used to go to ENO. I went to a version of Carmen. The man sitting next to me during the performance turned to me and said: “the ticket for this was cheaper than a ticket to his football game“ And it lasted longer!
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  383. I think President Obama is attempting to reverse the imperial presidency - the legacy of Nixon et al. His vision is that congress should make policy - a more European model where the legislature is the dominant element in the political system.
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  384. I squirmish in my chair when she appears
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  385. @TerryEFV2 but only after pounding you head on the desk first LOL
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  386. It is interesting that once one of these right-wing talk radio guys gets wounded how quickly they desert him. That is the ethics that these people teach and it is not working for them in the long run.
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  387. But the interesting thing is it was initiated by Sarah Palin calling for his sacking - she has yet to call for Rush's sacking.
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  388. To you and me it appears insane but then they think that we are. The interesting thing like the birther alternative universe - it got to the point that the two newspapers in Hawaii in 1961, the state of Hawaii government, the British Empire, the present Kenyan government and the whole apparatus of the US Federal government are in a giant conspiracy - the Beck universe is expanding as well - the question is when will it explode and what damage will it do.
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  389. The mechanism for controlling the LIBOR and many other things will have to be redesigned to benefit the communities not the banks.
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  390. I have never waited longer than fifteen minutes to vote in an election. It is disgusting that anyone should in America have too wait longer than that to vote. Parts of the USA are more third world than first world in the state government's incompetence.
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  391. I went to school everyday on double-decker buses from 1973 to 1979 I took a bus into the city where the school was then took a second bus from the city centre to my school. Four journeys a day - this was not in London but in West Yorkshire. As the journey into the city was forty-five minutes I used to do a lot of French and Latin vocabulary learning They are suitable for writing essays etc. on though LOL
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  392. It is a "What the F**k" moment. It will be interesting to see if Rush acknowledges it as a problem.
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  393. yes, she is often sited as one of the ten worst CEOs of all time.
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  394. Can I recommend a series from the BBC in the 1980s called the Beer Hunter It was a series of six half-hour programmes by the beer correspondent of the Huddersfield Examiner (my home town LOL) I think their are six episodes - typical for a short documentary series on the BBC. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAvEKxWI-6vSYgondk4rTzeURcS4kgkzJ It covers US beer, British beer, Czech beer (Bohemia), German beer and Belgian beer. Enjoy!
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  395. @jaba987 - describing someone as less bribable is like saying she is less of a child murdering sadist - it merely taints the opponent with the idea that if a bribe were offered in a hypothetical world the opponent would take it and she would not - it is at heart mudslinging as there is no evidence of bribe taking on either side.
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  396. @Steve197201 Sorry I am not confusing conservatives with Republicans and I was merely challenging your assertion that conservatives are independent - some are and some aren't - there are conservatives in the Republican Party, in other smaller parties and amongst those not registered with any party. I understood and accept that in the US conservative is a political outlook no co-terminal with the GOP. There are independent minded liberals in the USA as well. Independent not equal conservative
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  397. I live in Bielefeld above the Aldi equator I have never been in an Aldi Süd in Germany only Aldi Nord.
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  398. and we get Trader Joe's products in our Aldis
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  399. Newt's campaign might be out of money but he was selling books etc. so his personal wealth hasn't suffered.
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  400. The evidence of higher tariffs on prisoners are associated with higher crime rates. What that precise association is - I am not sure. There are liberal and conservative interpretations of these phenomena. I personally go more towards a liberal approach that rehabilitating people helps more and the requirement to work out your full sentence irrespective of whether you behave well is a disincentive to behave well. But these are fine judgement calls. Have you read the sentencing guidelines?
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  401. I have said for years that Americans fight wars as if they are in a Hollywood movie and I now think that the republicans also think they are in a Hollywood movie - this is very scary.
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  402. Didn't Rudolph "Truth isn't Truth" Guiliani make his career by the Milken trial which was white collar crime trial in 1989. He was often accused of prosecuting for political purposes at the time - would he not now prosecute Milken etc.?
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  403. Have you heard of "Paris syndrome" パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun where Japanese people who turn up in Paris are shocked that it is dirtier and more chaotic than Japanese cities and also their idealisation of Paris. I suspect the young man who was a first year High Schooler who mentioned Paris might be shocked by it in reality.
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  404. You make interpretation sound like a sin - I for one do not believe that the world is just black and white. Here is a though experiment for you - take a plate of food and ask a friend to tell you how to do all the mechanical movements to eat a spoonful of the food. You cannot interpret what you have to do it and even allowing you to have the fork in your hand. The interpretation that you do when you eat a spoonful of food is magnified in the law it is all interpretation - that is what it is.
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  405. I think it is funnier that they actually sat down and went "yes, that is a good advert to stick it to Campbell" - that is much much funnier as the image of a politician shooting herself in the foot is hilarious.
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  406. repetition - just say no!
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  407. My absentee ballots come as quickly when I am in another country (which is where I currently reside) but no-one in a first world country who wants to vote should have to wait more than 15 minutes and I have to say the fifteen minutes was because I went at a peak time and the ballot paper was over a metre (four feet) long and difficult for some people to manage in the booth.
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  408. So in Germany and in the United Kingdom where there is serious gun control - the government have total control of the people? Is this your serious belief? Or do you only believe that this is true in the USA which would then have one of the most evil governments in the world in that case.
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  409. The quotation from Richard Feynman that "If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood" is perhaps him expressing your point about explaining things to others.
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  410. The thing that strikes me about the case is the understanding of the law - because Islam, as I understand it, does not separate what in the west is viewed as secular and religious issues - taking a religious issue (effectively an exorcism request) to a court is not a problem - medieval church courts heard these kind of cases. The courts still exist within the older churches - where there are concepts like canon law they could hear that sort of case - requesting an exorcism.
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  411. @jag10 I didn't make the evidence for the ceiling in happiness up - Daniel Kahneman (a psychologist) has done work on this and it is based on US surveys and research. After $75 000 there is no increase in happiness caused by increase in having more income. The evidence suggests that helping the poor helps the well-being in society more than making the rich richer.
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  412. The cops are living in Hollywood - in the sense of living in the films - so that they like Cenk said they think a taser is a raygun on stun. That is certainly not the case.
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  413. I think that franksnow79 was referring to the British fox hunting laws. Democracy is about the rule of the majority over the minority - there is no right to fox hunting so in the case of Britain the law was changed and then the protests - noisy and angry were launched. The British have human rights that are since 2001 enforceable in the courts but fox hunting was not included LOL
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  414. The interesting thing is that the republicans have introduced anti-gay bills, anti-women bills etc all over the USA and as far as I am aware no job creating bills - yet every republican now wants to talk about jobs and the economy. Who thinks they have seen the poll results on this too.
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  415. Assertions are not evidence so that implies that you have no evidence for your assertions and are thus a troll and a racist and homophobic one at that. Not nice.
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  416. A "voiture sans permis" that has been reviewed a lot is a Citroen Ami seriously weird vehicles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=977cZO0qXEs
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  417. So the Federalist Papers circulated anonymously and crucial documents for interpretation of the US Constitution should be banned?
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  418. Isn't Nikki Haley the daughter of Indian immigrants whom this man would oppose being allowed into the country?
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  419. I think you are right about seeing a performance of a play like Dr Faustus rather than just reading it on the page. I have a love for Shakespeare fostered by my parents taking me to see Shakespeare plays from aged eight. I still remember seeing the RSC production of The Merchant of Venice with a memorable series of casket scenes and the caskets being life-size. But also Shylock's house popping up from the middle of the stage for the elopement scene. I had seen ten to fifteen Shakespeare plays by the time I did any formal study of one play - and it was dreary in the extreme in the classroom but I had laughed at a performance not long before.
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  420. I am currently studying (for pleasure as a retired mathematics teacher) Clifford Algebras also known as Geometric Algebra and looking at its uses in physics There are in that system items that are clearly "real" but their squares are minus one and this formalism seems to be both elegant and give explanations of phenomenon without resorting to using complex numbers I wonder whether it will ultimately be the way we understand physics using Geometric Algebra?
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  421. I am a tinkerer at heart Starting with Red Hat Linux 5.2 As a dual boot about 23 years ago and ditching Microsoft after a system failure and pulling all the windows files off the system via the Linux installation I then migrated to Ubuntu then Mint and then to Manjaro and currently Arch My partner is however someone who wants something that "just works" so I have installed a Linux Mint system there.
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  422. Doesn't punitive damages mean they are trying to punish the defendants in this case as the compensatory damages were deemed in sufficient.
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  423. I have to say that the most important point was actually when Cenk said that it was like a video game. I have to say that I think that the American military think they are either in a video game were the damage is not real or in a Hollywood movie where the good guys always win.
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  424. The sick puppies reference is to cool the heat from Fox - it is political expediency and it gives a semblance of balance to the proceedings and soon the false equivalence of MSNBC and Fox will be standard fare for the media.
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  425. I was studying in Beijing and went on a trip to Xi'an got in the lift in the hotel and said "五楼" and for the rest of the journey I was complimented on my Chinese LOL
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  426. A taste of my childhood having grown up in the West Riding of Yorkshire we had it every Bonfire night It was also baked by the local bakeries and part of school dinners too
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  427. @hollaboutit good quote
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  428. My partner and I did Raumabanen in the other direction we got the Hurtigruten service to Aalesund the town that burnt down in 1904 and was rebuilt in Art Noveau style which is fascinating to visit Then we got a bus at 06:00 in the morning to Aandalsnes and took the train up the Rauma valley to Dombaas station then on to Trondheim.
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  429. I have found a digital tool that fits my scatter gun mind I use a very flexible self-contained package called tiddlywiki and structure my journal through my reading.
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  430. I started it in hospital where I hadn't got any nice paper or pens But had my smartphone.
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  431. Laura Ingraham is feeding the prejudice of her viewers - they are feeding a meme into the system so people view the "liberal elite" as soft on terrorist and want the muslims to take over so in November they vote for the most right-wing candidate on the ballot. It is not about truth it is about a political agenda.
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  432. This looks excellent - and an excellent cast - Christopher Ecclestone and Victoria Wood - I believe there is Stephen Fry as well.
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  433. In my town we have a disco advertising "polska noc" or "polish night" so maybe some Germans might think Poland and things Polish are cool?
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  434. In the early 1980s in Britain there was a problem with stop and search - the equivalent of stop and frisk. It was reformed radically by the conservative government in 1984. The problem is that these searches are racist in inspiration and that is unacceptable.
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  435. Is this a Hollywood remake of the classic 1985 BBC short series "Edge of Darkness" - that was a great series - I always worry about Hollywood remakes especially as the original dependent on the serial nature and the cliff hangers. I just think "La Retour de Martin Guerre" and "Sommersby"
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  436. I suspect I might be more impressed that she tweeted this quote if I actually knew who Miley Cyrus was. The quote is good no matter who tweeted it.
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  437. Have you seen the Shavian alphabet? George Bernard Shaw in his will left a large sum for the development of a new alphabet for English and after a few years wrangling and a court case or two They awarded the prize to what is now called the Shavian alphabet.
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  438. Question: this guy has resigned - in the USA would be have been forced to resign?
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  439. Grayson certainly knows procedure very well and is fairly clearly a good operator on the floor and in committee. He cornered the gentleman from Georgia and he squirmed badly as he realised the trap was closing - the problem with the bill of attainder is that it needs a court case all the way to the supreme court probably to get it established and in the meantime there is no money for ACORN.
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  440. I live in a city in Germany called Bielefeld and according to some - Bielefeld doesn't exist and its claimed existence is a conspiracy. I am therefore part of the conspiracy as I claim to live here. It is an interesting point that how do you prove that Bielefeld actually exists?
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  441. My view and I am a European who is also a Quaker is that removing some guns from the system will not eliminate shootings etc. but it will, I believe, make it more difficult for someone who feels enraged to go and get a gun and kill a large number of people - they are more likely to knife or hit one or two people rather than mow down 10 or more people.
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  442. As it is a rate it is independent of population - so your comment is wrong - sorry homicides per 100 000 people US 5.8 England and Wales 1.37 When you multiply it by the populations the figures get worse: US 17 400 UK 780 When you look at gun crime the difference is huge US 3.1 UK 0.02 That should worry someone in the US.
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  443. @danjorgen - the record at HP is not good but she will be playing the honest outsider "Mr Smith goes to Washington" card for all it is worth.
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  444.  @shinriley  but I think there was a "guilty while being black" problem with the professor - which is not a pretty sight to behold.
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  445.  @shinriley  and you'd rapidly become a multi-millionaire even at $9.99 a pop. As a white Briton I have had to deal with racism in the classroom as well as homophobia - though not usually from the teaching staff (largely because I didn't see it as teachers teach alone). My "favourite" experience was in an adult class where I was co-teaching with three other people one of whom was of black British and one of the participants "complained" that they couldn't understand my black colleague. It was a "great opportunity" because my colleague's parent house and my parent's house were less than 2 miles (3 km) apart and we went to similar schools. So we cornered the participant in the break and challenged him pointing out that we came from the same town etc. yet he hadn't complained about understanding me. He crumbled immediately and apologised to my colleague.
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  446. "oh no, not again" as the bowl of petunias thought as it fell onto the planet Magarthea.
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  447.  @thelonegerman2314  No in the book which I still have on two pages in this thin popularisation of Gödel's Proof in the chapter on "The Problem of Consistency" There is reference to Riemannian geometry being reducible to the geometry of a Euclidean sphere. I in my seventeen year old mind see that as spherical geometry. I recommend reading the book it is short and clear explanation of Gödel's Proofs.
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  448.  @thelonegerman2314  No I mean the reduction of non-Euclidean geometry to Euclidean via spherical Euclidean geometry. The book isn't even 100 pages long and aimed at the general public. It referenced spherical Euclidean geometry and that was my sole encounter with it.
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  449. And like Liberace (what a role model for her) she is crying all the way to the bank.
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  450. and you know this from experience?
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  451. The political loose cannon that is the tea-party movement is an interesting phenomenon - similar to the 1930s - different agendas of course but the latching on to the nearest demagogue is interesting.
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  452. Well - I was making the point that unlike "Channel 4 Dogbreath, Illinois" Channel 4 in the UK is a bigger player in the British press. I like the Channel 4 News style with its longer programme thus being a cross between the BBC News and Newsnight. I lament the state of British journalism sometimes but the US is appalling in comparison.
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  453. Medieval churches where painted - we now think of them as striped of that colouring - when you see a church mocked up that way - just in part - disaster. The Vasa - a ship that was preserved for nearly 350 years - was painted and it looks terrible painted - the museum in Stockholm is amazing but humans have not progressed with there taste in colour schemes. Wasn't there an Arab sheik who painted the statues in his Hollywood mansion and got pilloried for doing so?
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  454. This is such a facepalm. Under which rock has this guy been living? The understanding of the origins and nature of HIV has been known for 25 years.
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  455. sadly the willy horton ad is seen as one of the most successful negative ads. It played to the fears of white US citizens that non-whites are out to get them. The problem for this strategy in the long term is that US society is changing and non-whites are a growing sector of the society.
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  456. I love the way this "bishop" Eddie Long has already got his porn star name LOL
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  457. As a British citizen, I am not a monarchist My preferred model of president would be similar to the Federal Republic of Germany rather than the out-of-date elected monarchy that is practised by the USA. Just for the record when Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor died at that point Charles Mountbatten-Windsor became King. The regnal name is the choice of the monarch and Charles' grandfather who ruled as George VI was born Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor and was called "Bertie" by the family. PS traditionally the royal family does not use their family name currently Mountbatten-Windsor and previously Windsor but as a non-Monarchist I always describe them with their name and surname. It is an old Quaker tradition that I like and have adopted
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  458.  @lyndoncmp5751  I am confused are you claiming that Quakers aren't real? Or are you making some other claim? If I said for example that I like an idea by Plato or Aristotle about something, does that imply I have to agree with everything that Plato or Aristotle wrote? Does it invalidate their idea that I don't believe some of their ideas are helpful? I am curious.
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  459. He has the reverse Midas touch.
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  460.  @mmhdata  Because Orangina always had a premium price it was a treat / luxury reserved for holidays
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  461. Tony Martin has a paranoid personality disorder and left a man to die while he went drinking and stayed with friends. That is a deep problem for me. He didn't do the right thing which is that he should have phoned the police. That was to say the least unpleasant and I feel manslaughter. I know nothing of the woman and her daughter you mentioned but it seems very different. I wonder whether the woman would have been helped by the legal system - better to have been doing some community work there
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  462. As you are from the UK and have been through the UK education system - do you know what level 5 in the National Curriculum in Mathematics says - that is an F in GCSE? It is about the interpretation of statistical data. First a rate per x of the population is independent of the population. This information has nothing to do with sentencing - for which the UK has sentencing guidelines - please look them up.
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  463. Here is a sample of "Yes, Prime Minister" about taking a survey and the results. watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA - hilarious but it making a serious point.
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  464. The company who put this ad in two small magazines in the UK now have international coverage for a brand I had not heard of before. One of the two magazines was "The Lady" magazine - famous for their nanny adverts and their servant adverts. They got the publicity they wanted. The Advertising Standards Authority is also a self-regulating trade body so the government have not banned it but the advertising industry have done it to themselves
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  465. @sc400575 You can download the series from the BBC website - it is 100 5 minute programmes - this is like a trailer or a summary.
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  466. I realise that this is a psycho-active drug which acts as a Norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitor but the name "Bath Salts" - first it made me think of my granny's bathroom then I thought of the Brass Eye spoof documentary when they got celebrities to come out against "cake".
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  467. @halcyon0830 Then Bush would cost the tax payers even more as there would be the lying in state etc.
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  468. Article II section 1 clause 5 says that the president and vice-president must be amongst other things "natural born citizens" - this as far as I know has not been tested in court so there are lots of opinions and no definitive rulings. The commonest interpretation is the person must be born of US citizens and it is safest if they are born in US sovereign territory. Cenk unfortunately fails I think on the first and definitely on the second.
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  469. Herbert Spencer, the founder of Social Darwinism, came too with the phrase "the survival of the fittest" when he was using and some say abusing Darwin's ideas and applying them to economic and social theory. It is not a helpful phrase to explain actual darwinism.
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  470. @DRockTX2 with the air of discovery in his voice as if it is the first time he has read them.
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  471. There will naturally be cases where majorities have been right and times they are wrong - I do not want my rights as a human being determined by a majority - they are inalienable in the jargon. That is the point about a rights based system like most Western countries. I think the founding fathers of the USA were suspicious of the people - they didn't trust elections either which is why they have the electoral college system for the president.
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  472. I feel sorry for you - in your bigoted homophobic and racist world - it is so sad that debate cannot be had without descent into your views on the minds of lesbians and gay men. So whose views on the constitution do you accept into your homophobic and racist world?
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  473. upon what do you base this accusation. Cenk has a wife and is an atheist - I need some evidence for this assertion. Can you provide it?
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  474. Can I say this reminds me of the Hurtigruten Ferries of Norway which run from Bergen to Kirkenes Though the decor and the amenities on the Hurtigruten look a bit nice The food service when my partner and I went was very good especially the freshly prepared dishes of the day.
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  475. Hilariously on the Hurtigruten when it had a long stop at Honningsvaag as many people go on a tour to see the Nordkapp We decided not to do that so we got a front-row seat to the safety practice where they launched lifeboats etc. It was interesting to see our waiter and the kitchen staff running round being efficient at getting folks on the lifeboat.
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  476. The "see I told you there were problems with x" gambit especially when he has thrown so much "pasta" at the "wall" to see if it will stick Is a classic technique of denialists And the current incumbent of the White House is a denialist He denies that a black president was legitimate He denies corona deaths can be prevented He denies white supremacy is an evil And even more alarming is He even denies responsibility for governing.
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  477. For federal elections there should be a federal standard for voting access so all these voter suppression laws aren't in states hands.
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  478. Unfortunately Governor Schwarzenegger used the mantra of the right that "the government cannot run anything" that ideology is as stupid as saying the government should run everything - both are recipes for disaster. He clearly does not believe it as he saw the benefits of the stimulus package. The problem is that the two answers were so discordant when next to each other. The governor is a pragmatic politician watering the roots with the mantra and trying to do things that might work.
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  479. LOL Grunge wasn't a thing in 1977 More like a stoners party But it is weird how they are not very tech savvy it is as if neither the DOGEists nor their Boss actually understand how these systems work. My what I did in the last week would look like this: 1. redacted 2. redacted 3. redacted 4. redacted 5. redacted
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  480. Did I miss something or did Alex not say - is repeating the process - and getting the red ball - does it continually alter the probability of the original ball?
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  481. Sadly Beck didn't even have the decency to nail his colours to the mast and has gone for the plausible deniability option - the "I am a clown" routine - "I don't know" - which fits the pattern of the accusatory question which sells the idea and also has the element of I was only asking a question when his "facts" are checked.
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  482. But the pay-out is not the point the lower premiums for sensible gun ownership is the key. The insurance companies will win but that is what makes it a Republican option - the fact that the current Republican party is paid off by the gun manufacturers is the problem.
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  483. I have to say I saw several Elon Musk tweets who I have never followed that account or engaged with the account after the Superbowl though it seems to have quietened down.
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  484. I think since this video the state of Tennessee has revoked his firearms certificate temporarily at least.
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  485. @berny88925 The twitter account @RonPaul is not operated by Ron Paul himself personally but I understand it is run by his campaign - which in my understanding is something that IS under his control. If the twitter account is not under his control he can say that and he did not - end of story. If it is his campaign's twitter account - he has to say so and take responsibility for it or is he immune from responsibility for his own campaign. Either way he does not look good for Ron Paul.
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  486. But the responsibilities of the congress (part of the government so they are by your logic corrupt asses themselves) are on the body as a whole - cannot members of congress cooperate and work in teams and with their staff that are paid for by the taxpayers - the model you suggest is that if I had to sign myself personally a contract for 1 Trillion US Dollars - I would read the small print of the contract carefully - but that has to be done by congress as a whole - not by one individual.
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  487. Jesus was both a radical rabbi and thus deeply conservative - his teachings are often versions of Deuteronomy - at least as recorded in the Gospels. Rick "Frothy" Santorum is one of the least christian people Í have encountered. He needs to read Matthew 23 and realise it is referring to him. This speech was given just after he was crushingly defeated in his bid to be re-elected in 2006 as well because he wasn't even able to keep the support of his own state's electorate.
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  488. Is there a civil rights case to sure the officers and the university administration for abridging the students rights?
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  489. not so sure about the quality of the "flair" - it seems to be fairly primitive in its style - no sign of sophistication.
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  490. Strange that the US has such high homicide rates and the Europeans don't - why do you think that might be?
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  491. Ms Brewer is seeking election as governor of arizona - for the first time - she is an appointee. So she misspoke when she said "our law enforcement officers find ..."
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  492. Firstly you don't seem to be aware of the Barber budgets in the early 1970s or the monetarist policies of the Callaghan years. I also think that it is interesting to note that early 1980s inflation zoomed up and only fell to 1978 levels (single digit in other words) after Mrs Thatcher's team had crashed the economy.
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  493. In the UK the election expenses for a MP are 7150 GBP (10 800 USD approx) and then 7p per elector in the district (10.5 US cents) thus for my constituency of 85 000 electors - the candidates have 13 000 GBP or just under 20 000 USD. I randomly chose a US congressional district in this case Ohio district 9 - population 630,730 - would give a limit of 77 500 USD per candidate. A healthier figure I feel.
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  494. as a republican (not a Republican) I see no value in the monarchy or their flunkies. I see value in having a non-executive head of state and a parliamentary system. Coalitions in the US are as necessary as anywhere - in the case of the USA the coalitions ignore party lines as the parties seem to be very weak. Yet you seem to be suggesting that you want factionalism to be stronger in the USA - less coalitions - isn't that against Federalist Paper no 10?
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  495. Given the new president of Argentina was planning to take a hatchet to "red tape" is there any Argentinian Law left?
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  496. I think the way to deal with that power is to use the techniques of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr - non-violent and then when the cops arrest you etc. the video cameras show you not resisting and not getting the better of the guy who attacked you etc. It is hard to not fight back physically but the technique does work.
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  497. John Profumo was a British politician in the 1960s he was in the centre of a scandal which is overshadowed by "George Santos"'s alleged misdeeds and he resigned and went and worked at Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in a very poor part of London, he worked cleaning their toilets. That to me is how you redeem yourself.
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  498. "most transvestites are straight" is probably what you mean. Transsexuals believe they are in the wrong body but transvestites are cross-dressers.
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  499. His website link from the European Parliament website and his facebook links have gone. He is still listed as a member of Jobbik but he has to resign the seat he cannot be unseated by the party. It will be interesting to see where what he does next.
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  500. @gamingsoul11 The coverage by the media is of course an issue but she basically looks stupid saying a non-sequitor to a legitimate question - to which if she says one thing she energises her base but alienates the mainstream and if she appeals to the mainstream she alienates her base - she will have a hard time moving to the centre and the chances of her moving the message that far right in a year and a bit are quite low.
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  501. <parody> They were Trump appointments BUT... were they TRUMPY enough? </parody>
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  502. I love Rush's description of New Jersey Politics as bluer than blue - so blue it is almost black. If you look at the governorship of NJ - since 1947 there have been 33 years with Democratic Party governors and 27 years with Republican Party governors - that makes it pretty evenly split to my mind and if you look at the last elections 2009 D to R, 2005 R to D etc. - not a true blue or red state. Oopsy doopsy Rush.
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  503. The substitute teacher made you watch right-wing propaganda in television and there was no alternative vision explored. And the republicans complained about the President doing his stay in school and learn speech.
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  504. His sense of entitlement is amusing. He is an advocate for the one percent and thinks he is entitled to subservient service from others. If I hated him I would shake the soda hard beforehand and then deliver it to him and ask if he wants it opened. He'll say leave it and get out full in the face later LOL
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  505. She is not a citizen therefore she is not eligible for student loans - if she was there legally but not a citizen she would not be eligible so the illegal vs legal is not an issue. The question of a pathway for people to get citizenship is the important part. By the way did the USA not sign up to its obligations to deal with refugees and these people say they are?
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  506. So you are saying we are all intuitively Aristotelian in our thinking about motion.
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  507. More interesting in the widening of the definition of terrorism is the Kentucky state law v=QDpkpADnUW8
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  508. Rational debate is nice - as a gay man and as a pacifist - I have studied and used non-violent direct action and that is a good model to me at least. Do you think rational debate is possible with these angry mobs? And how do we get to rational debate with them?
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  509. The Republican Party nominee are basically puppets - Bush Jr read 70 odd books a year - and we are talking 400 plus page books. He was not running the country it was being done for him - he was just the front man - they would like the same with Romney who on day one would be a puppet - in a gilded cage but a prisoner to his minders.
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  510. He is inside a bubble of republican primary audiences. It sounds bad outside the bubble but he only hears the sounds inside the bubble.
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  511. I remember watching the "Eyes on the Prize" and viewing it as history and feeling that there had been progress. The seeing a white backlash in Boston in 1973 - when I was 11 - it frightened me that it is still with us.
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  512. Sadly he was born in Istanbul so is ineligible.
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  513. Interestingly the Conservative government in Britain withdrew mortgage tax relief.
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  514. @yitzchak13 Agreed - I hope he got the nomination as that would be fun to see more of him being a tool.
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  515. Is out likely to get to the supreme court? It will be struck down by every court and the supreme court can refuse to hear it.
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  516. The language of malt and brewing is shared by both German and English I live in Germany and I worked in a town where there was a brewery with a mural explaining the process of brewing and so many of the words are similar It implies that brewing beer had a common vocabulary amongst the Western Germanic tribes before the Angles and Saxons left Though yeast is not one of them interestingly
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  517. When I was studying Chinese in China, as soon as I went off the beaten track I would be stared at. Mostly because I was white, have a full beard and hairy legs and arms. There is a lot of curiosity about foreigners and the differences between them and foreigners. There was also an assumption that I didn't speak Chinese which was interesting and a smidgen irritating. I suspect cultures like Chinese and Japanese which have few foreigners relatively in their societies tend to be curious and sometimes unthinking about the foreigners in their midst.
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  518. When it comes down to the wire - it will be a choice between Obama and a conservative republican and the black voters are not likely to be turkeys voting for an early thanksgiving, He has to get the white vote and some of the "Fox News" viewers too sadly.
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  519. I was looking for stuff on historiography (that was my search term in YouTube and your video popped up - and it reminded me of first encountering E. P. Thompson's work and The Making of the English Working Class - which I need to reread after nearly forty years break. I have recently found a copy of his biography of Morris and want to read his last work on Blake but have yet to get round to even finding a copy. Thanks for the video - it was entertaining. I do hope you do one on Gramsci - who is also an interesting take on history - thought he probably falls in the category of "team philosophy" rather than "team history" in your suggested grudge match.
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  520.  @CynicalHistorian  Definitely "team philosophy" LOL His concepts of hegemony etc are useful to look at history and provide lenses to view things - I wonder if he will ever get a "major follower" - difficult to tell at this stage.
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  521. As a European I am surprised that folks aren't familiar with the word “crudités“ which is just French for “raw vegetables“ Crudités isn't posh or snobby but I do understand that it shows Dr Oz to be out of touch. Like the lack of basket, lack of looking for a pre-packed veggie tray or similar
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  522. I think you are referencing the 1997 film which followed the 1973 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie and the two BBC series of the Borrowers' books in the early 1990s. Not sure the term "original" can be applied to the 1997 film either in terms of films or in comparison of the television programmes where the BBC has precedence.
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  523. I remember when my sister lived in Baltimore doing her post-doc and her car broke down in the black area of town and she got out and was assisted by a man and she then got to work - when she told her American colleagues one woman asked why she had not wound the windows up and phoned the police. I thought that was an over reaction as someone brought up in Europe but it is pervasive. Now it would be lock yourself in your car, pull a gun and shoot anyone who tries to help.
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  524. He is a republican there dominant meme of the republican party is I am okay and you are not okay - they have succeeded and you are a loser for not doing the same.
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  525. I find it amusing that a person from a party that has embraced and been taken over by the religious right-wing didn't check out the companies before giving the award. There is the other right-wing part of the party which is nor morally conservative - for example Barry Goldwater was libertarian on lesbian and gay rights so Newt Gingrich should have taken that line - I suspect he isn't concerned except that his supporters will be offended.
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  526. The mantra that if a man carrying a knife is within 20 ft (6 m) he can be on top of you in no time and the implication that he should be shot sounds like "police lore" - something they teach every police officer and that part needs reviewing. I am not saying it is wrong (the first part) just that it seems so definite and arbitrary.
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  527. The evidence suggests that as people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises. Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness. So getting people to that sort of income is imperative - and it can be done by taxing the rich.
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  528. Firstly the guy was hijacking a meeting about something else so he was already on a loser. He wanted to generate hate for him - he thrives on being hated - they did respond to his negativity - he suceeded in getting seen - I have seen him four or five times so he has name recognition at least.
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  529. The Hyper-inflation period in the Weimar Republic was in 1921-23 and was solved by the Weimar Republic and Hitler was at this point a very minor political rabble rouser in Bavaria - who had not even undertaken the Hitlerputsch (in English it is the Beer Hall Putsch). He did not come to power for another ten years. He depended on creating fears - misleading fears in the population about others and his "evil" oppenents and his brown shirts were used to break up political meetings. Sound familiar?
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  530. So why is it retarded to think that he managed to meet with a General he needs to meet with to discuss policy without either side going to the other and then there would be a big hoo-haa about that. The press seem to have largely missed it and it was the visit to the IOC that caught the spotlight of the right-wing - they did the meeting and General McChrystal probably didn't have to deal with the press etc. Wins all round.
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  531. I was reminded of the comment by E. B. White who wrote: "Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind." I find humour in foreign languages really hard harder than Shakespeare, Goethe, Pirandello, Molière in their original languages. I saw Dom Juan by Molière in Finnish at the National Theatre in Helsinki and at some points a ten year old boy and myself were the only people laughing at what I think is a funny play which was weird but it is a cultural thing in Finland where open expression of emotions is frowned upon.
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  532. Not sure less freedom would be true - the UK has as part of its legal code the European Convention of Human Rights. On most of the measures the UK and the USA come out fairly comparably - that is not to say that some freedoms are not prized more highly in the different cultures.
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  533. Franklin was a Deist by the end of his life - he therefore believed that God created the world and then let it run its course - he was certainly not a theist nor would he have been a rightwing evangelical christian as these Republicans would like.
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  534. To take a slightly different tack on this - the costs incurred by the State of Arizona in this case - 4.5 month of prison costs and the costs of the "investigation" and the costs that I suspect can be claimed by the woman for the wrongful imprisonment and the perjury of officers of the State will be substantial and the consequences for the reputation for the state are terrible. Perhaps they should think that some heads should roll for this waste of their tax dollars?
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  535. The problem for the Komen Foundation is that they have introduced politics (nasty vile anti-life politics) into their grant giving and that places suspicion over all their decisions. Question: has anyone resigned over this fiasco? If not, then I worry it is all a PR cover-up.
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  536. I fear that in the USA there is a real problem with the taser happy cop and there are a large number of people who have been shown on video being tasered by policemen often because the policemen felt he was "loosing" to the grandmother or woman with her child. Not sure the Europeans have it much better. I think iun every society the police are hated and disliked by many.
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  537. Why has this not been to court to test its constitutionality?
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  538. So she is an Illinois Republican then?
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  539. I started learning programming in an after school club where we were allowed to punch cards and submit Fortran programmes to the local University mainframe. This was in the 1970s - I learnt C, C++ and Smalltalk but as a hobby I have been learning Lisp for the intellectual interest. Plus I have encountered a language called Lua and its Lisp cousin fennel where it takes Lisp like material and converts it to Lua.
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  540. Like Bush - she is using the populist tack to appeal to a particular segment of the US population. I think she is not even as intelligent as Bush and is simply a greedy woman who thinks she can make lots of money from this. The people who are manipulating her or would like to manipulate her have some very nasty agendas that are covered by the "ahh shucks, I'm just like you" faux folksiness.
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  541. And yet the "town hall meeting" is seen as a bastion of direct democracy in their original form in New England. Perhaps you should not think of them as decision making meetings as the decisions are made in Congress - but as threshing meetings - where ideas could if the mob were willing to listen could be thrown around. I still love the guy who shouted get your government hands of my medicare LOL
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  542. Sadly, I am old enough to remember the late seventies and early eighties and the rise of neoliberalism in the UK.
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  543. Everyone knows that any legal advice that starts with "Everyone knows..." is problematic. Is it not?
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  544. Is it - I thought their job was to ensure good legislation got into law - that does not mean reading five thousand pages of a bill - it means having a staff who can do that for them and feed them the info they need at the time. I don't think any member of congress reads all the legislation put before the house. Strangely I think they are skilled enough not to have to do that.
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  545. I worked in a small town in Germany called Oelde and several times a week you got the smell of the brewery because my classroom was right next to the local brewery I like the smell of brewing but I don't drink so I couldn't comment on whether this local beer was any good.
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  546. Why does Liz Trotta remind me of Serena Joy in the Handmaiden's Tale? Two things, she preaches what she herself does not do and she would herself be miserable if her own views were implemented.
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  547. @Pleblian - I am not so sure the American people know that - the Republican game plan says - we are for health care reform - yes it needs reform but not your reform - we want real reform. All US politics seems to be mired in corporate money and I doubt if there is any real way out of it with the current model - it has been going too long and has been too successful for those that get office to be reformed.
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  548. He is a college student prankster who believed his own hype and the hype of others. He deserves the book throwing at him. The big issue is the PATRIOT Act which is what bush/CHENEY used to cover their wire-tapping - I believe. It is still there on the statute books.
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  549. Indeed. Hopefully it will come out of the carpet.
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  550. First question is when did the USA develop the office of co-president? That of a new idea from the WSJ.
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  551. So which other laws and decisions pander to the fringe movements of special interest groups? Loving v. Virginia or Laurence v. Texas? - both minorities. The fact is that the British Parliament decided to give the right to change the gender for all legal purposes to transsexuals. Their decision was likely based on advise following the success of several cases against the Government in recent years. Now that they have granted those rights - they will have to work through the knock on effects.
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  552. It depends on how the guy addressed the male senators - if he said Senator to them - and only ma'am to Senator Boxer - it is sexist so that is the problem and she is right to call him on that.
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  553. I think of Robert Maxwell in Britain and father of Ghislaine Maxwell who sued, sued and sued again to keep his nefarious operations secret This all came out after his death in 1991 and his businesses and their dodgy practices were finally detail. Trump isn't the first nor will he be the last, sadly
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  554. That pesky President Obama inventing time travel and going back in time and abandoning Czechoslovakia before 1992, he is truly an evil genius. BTW why do evil geniuses always invent some fantastic machine and then use it to do some minor thing like abandon Czechoslovakia?
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  555. If you logically extend the neighbors analogy - why don't all US citizens pay a little tax and then you would all be helping your neighbors.
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  556. interestingly it is the most noticeable in its bias - the question then becomes why is it noticeable?
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  557. In a radically secular society and technically the USA is radically secular by design, any religious teaching in public schools is not permitted and the counter example of the Holy Qur'an shows the true intent of the law.
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  558. The fact that this is powerful is that the ACU president David Keane (sp?) does not seem to have an exit strategy - perhaps because he was lulled into a false sense of security by it being a right-wing event. He needs a polite "I am not talking to you and I would like you to leave" which if repeated would be boring but Zeigler got threatened and called names - oopsy-doopsy.
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  559. @N0nC0nF0rMi5T I was thinking eight year old so that is 3rd grade humor - and yes Republicans are mostly in the third grade when it comes to their behavior.
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  560. racist homophobes - to be more exact
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  561. The Reverend Ed's church is in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada so visiting his church would be a transcontinental expedition for Ana.
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  562. Another drive-by comment that now I discover makes the program money - hell keep on doing it brother as I think they are a good show and take an interesting perspective.
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  563. There is an interesting thing about race it is the fault line in America - in the society race is the number one issue spoken/unspoken in other countries I would say that other things are the fault line - the British are obsessed by social class and the Germans by who has the certificate to do something - not if they are any good. Race and racism are the elephant in the room in the USA
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  564. I am not sure that the district attorney's office official who would investigate whether to bring charges would be being petty - are they not sworn to uphold the law? I would personally go for a sjambok - they are effective and disabling but not as deadly - well I am sure you can sjambok someone to death but it is not as easy as it is with a Japanese sword.
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  565. Sarkozy lost the election rather than Hollande winning - he led the country into the financial meltdown and was felt by many French people as out of touch and aloof.
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  566. Sadly that letter would bring in some dollars for the Tea Party Express and that is all they care about. The truth is not important to them - the debunking of these people takes longer than it does to say it and they are saying the next thing by the time the debunking is done. It is not a pretty picture to behold.
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  567. The prisoner is legally classified as a she - under the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 so that is the first issue. The prisoner is legally female. That Act was the result of a case taken to the European Court of Human Rights which established transgender rights under article 8. You could argue that a the law is wrong or this particular judgement is wrong and we do not know if the Government will appeal the decision or not.
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  568. Sadly true, I was sad about myself for thinking: "Why haven''t they shot him yet?"
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  569. Donahue is a mimophant - he tramples over other people like an elephant but his own sensibilities are as sensitive as a Mimosa
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  570. In the Scopes trial in 1925 - remember Scopes lost and was fined and the act stayed on the books until 1967 in Tennessee. The important thing is the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005 in Pennsylvania when teaching creationism was seen as failing the Lemon Test.
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  571. However a Chemistry grade is often required for medical training. My sister who was a biochemistry researcher attached to a university hospital and she had a lot of medical students doing her organic chemistry courses for the grade requirements not for the learning She said she felt there was a significant number of the medical students who felt entitled to a good grade independent of work done or understanding achieved.
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  572. I think the Democratic Party are down on their knees praying and fasting to keep Michele Bachmann in the spotlight - she is priceless for the comedy republican value - showing them how stupid their views are.
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  573. I think Carrie Prejean does not understand the concept of "inappropriate" and does not understand the questions - she is out of her depth and it is showing. CNN should have had a wide angle lens to see her advisor and recording that conversation as that would be priceless in the tragicomedy of the fall from grace of Ms Prejean.
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  574. The problem is that "natural" and is usually opposed to "artificial" and that would apply to something that is made from non-biological organic components - processing natural products still leaves then a natural product. It will be hard to prove otherwise.
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  575. Does the Fibonacci sequence start with 0 and 1? 0,1,1,2,3,5,8...
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  576. As the monarch was abolished in 1918/1919 in the country I live in - I do not understand your comment. The constitution of the country I live in was framed with guidance by American and British lawyers after the Second World War and I suspect is the sort of constitution that the USA or the UK would like to have - rather than the quaint and old-fashioned US constitution or the mess of the UK.
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  577. In the summer of 2021 I read "The Lehman Trilogy" in Italian It is over eight hundred pages long and it took me six weeks to complete. It was a wonderful experience as my Italian was very rusty But the novel was written in verso libero (free verse) so there was repetition and short sentences which helped. It was my first verse novel - as an adult and was a fascinating experience.
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  578.  @jshaers96  And the longest I have spent on a single book as well.
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  579. I personally think the Bush/CHENEY presidency was really the CHENEY/Bush presidency - Dick Cheney was taking decisions that didn't cross Bush's desk until he had to sign them. I have to say - that I thought of the governor and Heddy Lamarr scenes in Blazing Saddles with the Bush/CHENEY presidency. Rahm Emanuel is nowhere near to taking all the decisions in the current White House.
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  580. In French there are two words: faubourg and banlieue for suburb Faubourg seems to come from being outside the historic gates of a medieval city so they tend now to be what we would think of as urban areas Banlieue is a more modern term and seems to correlate with dormitory places though often not with single family houses as European cities have moved inner city residents out to new developments (called "projects", I think, in the US) on the fringes of cities.
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  581. @berny88925 "anyone can send a tweet" - only if they have set up an account and then have the password or are you suggesting that the person who write the @RonPaul tweets is any random person - I think you have taken a view that Ron Paul can do no wrong and are now fitting the facts to suit your case. The analogy you chose was an interesting one - my mother is five years older than Ron Paul and I am not sure she even knows of the existence of Twitter - but she is a free agent - not in my employ
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  582. My experience of Swedish driving has been of being a pedestrian in various Swedish towns and cities and my impression was that Swedes drive very carefully and my feeling was that if they saw you crossing the road on a pedestrian crossing half a kilometre away they slowed visibly and approached with caution.
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  583. what I was commenting on was the "no interpretation" concept of law - which would mean that there is no law courts as there job is to interpret it. Is this set of acts by this person a crime or not. Without interpretation of the law nothing can occur in court. The members of congress job is to pass legislation and I hope that is is good legislation - and the constitution says that the test of a good legislator is the ballot box - not sure whether it is the best judge but it is the system.
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  584. Rupert Murdoch is not just right-wing he also likes to influence events - that is what drives him. He moved from Australia to the UK and took over newspapers and got into the satellite television business. He then enjoyed manipulating the press and supporting or demonising politicians. It has taken him longer to get his US interests into the important places to lever power but he is working his way to do it.
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  585. @ andron333 - I was merely pointing out something that is key to the nature of the story - that Sarah Palin initiated the apology tour then as far as I am aware has not called out Rush Limbaugh in the same way. I am fascinated by the double standard but am aware that the first attack on Rahm Emanuel really had no merit and was a political point scoring operation. That Rush Limbaugh indirectly called her out was interesting.
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  586. He knows that he wouldn't get any votes if he told the truth.
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  587. In the last year's of Pope Benedict XVI reign I went to Regensburg - where Joseph Ratzinger had been professor of Theology and in the theology section of the cathedral bookshop There was a huge amount of Nietzsche and I felt they were wrestling with it. I read Nietzsche as a "teenage" read not that you have to be a teenager to read it but that when you are looking critically into what you had received Nietzsche is a witty and sparkling critic who makes you think about what you believe. I think for me Nietzsche is someone whose writings I have returned to over and over again and gained from them though my philosophy hasn't moved to be like his he has influenced it.
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  588. I wonder if the rush to build metros in the 1970s was generated by the oil crisis in 1973 when oil prices quadrupled overnight I suspect that released some of the funding for new metro plans even if they were made in the earlier decades.
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  589. BTW we have a mixed system in the town (in Germany) where I live it is a light-rail / tram system in the outreaches and goes underground in the city centre and we have a population of 350 000 approx.
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  590. So you accept no-one into your sad world to help you understand the US constitution. And you know little or nothing about me - your "reality" must be fueled by something that I suspect is illegal in the state you live in.
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  591. It reminds me of the 19th century in its treatment of women - these people would role back the women's movement. If it was Old Testament times would she as the rape victim not have been forced to marry the man?
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  592. @calvinhobbesliker2 I agree with his sentiment that we should live simply that others may simply live. That does not preclude technology and he depended on it to get his message out and if I remember correctly one of his assistants said it cost a fortune to keep him in poverty.
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  593. The excuse wall they've been throwing the pasta at for over a month must be pretty dirty now as none of it has stuck.
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  594. Susan G Komen are heading for a PR disaster which will mean there funding will go down the pan. Sad, sad, sad.
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  595. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad
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  596. Just remember what happened after Silvio Berlusconi insulted Finnish food, Finnish chefs beat Italy to first place in the 2008 America's Plate International Pizza Contest, with a smoked-reindeer pizza called the Berlusconi. Beware the Finns bearing dishes!
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  597. The idiocy of the church is that they might actually gain a faithful catholic in the child but they are turning away that chance because the child has two mothers. Facepalm.
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  598. Yes, all of Europe has hundreds of death panels - as we all have state funded health-care - we regularly murder the elderly - preferably in front of their children and grandchildren, NOT. The right-wing in America has seriously lost the plot.
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  599. It appears it is a remake and that explains why it feels like a 1987 film (in a good way) - it is well worth seeing the original series - it was very powerful at the time and it was slap bang in the middle of the Reagan Thatcher love fest and the cruise missiles pointing at the Soviet Union.
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  600. I forget that a lot of Americans live such sheltered lives and forget one the coca-colonisation of the world by American products or that people actually speak other languages besides English.
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  601. It is interesting that even the photoelectric effect can be explained without quantising light. It can be explained by saying that the matter has specific states not light. Hence the late development of quantum optics.
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  602. I have a tendency to not throw out old laptops and bits and I suspect I have a several PC-cards somewhere. I think now I have retired and need to sort my cupboard of cable hell out and ditch a lot of the stuff which I will never use again.
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  603. If he sued isn't he open to discovery and that would be problematic for the former president.
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  604. The FBI has a history of doing this kind of thing. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was thoroughly investigated and money was wasted doing it as well
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  605. The surreal sheep on a pedestal - that was pure comic genius - however the person who wrote thios must work for her opponent?
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  606. I do a waffle mix (now the history of waffles might be interesting) which is just 1 ripe banana, 1 cup of oats and a cup of plant milk After whizzing it up and leaving it for a while I throw it in the waffle iron (though it could go in a frying pan) and they make great waffles.
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  607. What about repeating a lie often enough and the bigger the lie the better - that seems to be the policy of some of the right-wing commentators in the US.
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  608.  @K4inan  I fear I may be a living piece of history as I used Briton rather than a longer circumlocution as I hate Brit.
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  609. I think Mr Beck, if he cared, would class you as a Maoist subversive indoctrinating the children with your ideas of ... Sorry I cannot keep a straight face.
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  610. The guy seemed to be wearing a "Free State Project" T-shirt - is he a member?
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  611. I was on holiday in Vienna last week and was visiting the Wittgenstein House in the suburbs of Vienna - I like the philosophy of Wittgenstein and modern architecture so it was a great combination. There was next to the house a bronze place that said in translation "social security is the most reliable foundation of democracy" and Johann Boehm who said it was the first president of the Austrian social insurance providers association. I think that health care security is crucial for democracy.
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  612. The man will be dropped by the conservatives in 5, 4, 3, ... Then used as a victim of his freedom of speech even though it is an unacceptable comment.
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  613. Oh no it's the git-wizard!
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  614. He is a cross-dresser but a cross-dresser from the "little house on the prairie" school of fashion. I find that really really bizarre. I also note that there were dress codes for women dressing as men and one of the proofs that Joan of Arc was a witch was her choice of manly attire.
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  615. @farneyblakeley the age of consent in Europe is generally around fourteen to sixteen with various stipulations. The USA with its age of consent set at eighteen is very high.
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  616. Many years ago I read "Going Dutch" by Lisa Jardine about what England plundered from the Dutch. King William III the late 17th century king was Dutch and he with his wife Mary II invaded in what would be called "The Glorious Revolution" in 1689. This definitely established / consolidated the limited state in British life. Voltaire who visited fifty years later held up the British state as an example of freedom and liberty.
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  617.  @klontjespap  The Orangemen and the name William are strongly associated with the protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland. The Jacobites who William of Orange defeated in Ireland celebrated the "gentleman in the velvet coat" when William died after a riding accident where the horse stumbled on a mole-hill.
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  618. I think you are right about Ayn Rand I remember someone being bitten by the Rand bug at college in 1980 - the start of Thatcher and Reagan and I read it and found the book I read "bilge water" and felt it was a cult. I was on the left but not a Marxist Marx always struck me as a good sociologist but not very interesting philosophically and Capital is truly boring - I feel sorry for the folks in Eastern Europe who had to read it. (I read a biography of Engels and he comes across as a nicer chap lol) I also like the quote by George Orwell: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." Neither Camus or Sartre do I see as philosophers more philosophical novelists. Weirdly as a teenager I tried to read Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and got through half or so but the artifice of it made the points too opaque for me. I then tried "Beyond Good and Evil" and was more to my taste Like he had to get the artsy stuff out before writing it. BTW in Regensburg Dombuchhandlung in the THEOLOGY section which served the Department of Catholic Theology which Benedict XVI had been head of there were more Nietzsche books than in their philosophy section. I think someone was doing Nietzsche in a course in the theology section LOL.
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  619. I hear the fear in the judgement but I wonder is that a fear of the MAGA crowd because if it is then they are surrendering their power to one of the candidates for the Republican nomination for the president of the USA and that seems silly. I agree they weren't going to allow a free for all on the fourteenth amendment as Texas was going to try to exclude Biden for being Biden so there would be a division in the country that reminds us of the 1850s.
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  620. The framers of the constitution did not expect to have a standing army but a citizen militia however that plan fell by the wayside very rapidly and the second amendment became an empty shell at that point which I fear has been loaded with poison for the benefit of gun manufacturers whose mouthpiece is the NRA.
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  621. Fox "News" has confused George Soros with Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984 who was a fictional creation of the Ministry of Truth to use as a scapegoat for things that go wrong.
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  622. The private presidential tape recordings from the 60s and 70s are full of swearing - much worse than "smart ass" - which I would not view as swearing. Many a true word is spoken in jest
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  623. The more interesting question is "what is the model used for the predictions like and is it still robust?" Being right can be by chance - the question is not whether they are right so much as whether they help us now to understand.
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  624. The revolution will eat its own - Volcker was the architect of the neoliberal state and now he is called too liberal LOL
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  625. I remember the program "Eyes on the Prize" broadcast on PBS in the 1980s - it was a history of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, 1960s and ultimately in the 1970s. There were a lot of baying mobs on those programs - mostly white folks shouting down black people and being aggressive and obnoxious.
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  626. Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet was using the original text edited down - as all modern stagings are. It is an excellent film - I enjoyed it and I liked the Ian McKellan 1930s setting of Richard III - again in the original language but set in a 1930s proto-fascist world.
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  627. The frightening thing is that this priest will be shocked that his statements are challenged he is so used to being in the bubble chamber of the priestly world he thinks this is actually sane.
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  628. It is interesting to compare the lynch mob with the non-violent civil disobedience a la Martin Luther King Jr - these are the angry mob - they would rather lynch than be lynched. In Britain when they outlawed hunting foxes with dogs - a barbaric "sport" - there were angry scenes and ultimately a court case that confirmed part of the British constitution - yes they have one it just isn't one single document. The angry mobs didn't win - the rule of law won.
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  629. Let's start the "No to the census" campaign in Minnesota - so her district goes LOL
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  630. Stupid comment and ignorant of French cultural history especially the 1930s. I think there is also the problem that in the USA race is such a trigger issue where in France it is not as big.
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  631. MLK did indeed follow the Gandhian model which in turn is based on the Tolstoi's writings and ultimately on Thoreau's original. I believe that the non-violent method got more achieved and in terms of TV seeing people being angry and irrational isn't as good as seeing them being polite and the others being angry and irrational. The analogy with the fox hunting was not that it's rights and wrongs - I personally follow Siegfried Sassoon's characteristation. It was the baying mobs.
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  632. Piers Morgan by European standards is giving Bachmann an easy ride and she is getting uppity about that? Check out Jeremy Paxman on the BBC to see challenging interviewing.
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  633. "The great North Star with its steady light, Over land and sea a beacon bright." They are lines from the Alaska State Song - I assumed it was something like that and googled it - she is using a bit of poetry to reinforce her folksiness. But usually you have to use something others might know LOL
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  634. A very republican solution that the republicans will hate - it is a market solution where careful gun ownership and keeping weapons in a weapon safe etc. will mean lower premiums.
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  635. I have to say most Europeans find the current Republican party platform and attitudes completely alien and vaguely laughable that anyone who vote for them apart from a handful of very rich people. Obama would comfortably fit in the right wing of our mainstream right-of-centre parties and here in Germany we have the SPD, the Greens and the Left parties that are more left than him and they are just the parties that hold seats and form governments within Germany.
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  636. It is interesting how the right-wingers seem to have got their panties in a bunch over this one. As was pointed out this whole story could have gone away of the republicans had just let her testify and ignored her.
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  637. The "Race Hustlers" comment by Candace Owen reminds me of Serena Joy in the Handmaid's Tale who enables the "Gileadean state" but ends up a victim of the new state and VERY BITTER. Was that face her realisation of her "Serena Joy" status.
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  638. @migkillertwo because the process is a liberalisation of the law - and that is always harder than making something illegal.
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  639. Another example of tariffs that were a big big problem were the British Corn Laws (1815 - 1846) which were only repealed in 1846 in the second year of the Irish Potato Famine as they were hindering the feeding of the Irish poor. They were aimed at bolstering the landed gentry who were dominant in the parliament at the time (full adult male suffrage didn't happen until technically the twentieth century but in 1867 the working class renters above a certain value of property got the vote) The repeal of the corn laws was actively sought by the urban bourgeoisie through the early 19th century and was part of the free trade movement.
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  640. The anecdotal evidence is that first that when a film is shown on television sales of the DVD go up afterwards, second that the big media companies do the leaking.
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  641. Anyone notice that the EIF week was co-sponsored by Fox - so his own parent company is part of this Maoist conspiracy - either they must withdraw immediately or he should resign as otherwise he will be tainting himself with Maoism. He also works in a fascist building as he already pointed out. His paranoia is growing and growing and eventually it will burst and let us hope it does not mess up too many things when it goes.
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  642. My favorite line from the Buchanan piece was "As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?" So by that logic Britain never invaded India etc. and the US never invaded Iraq or Afghanistan. mmmmm...
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  643. The big companies will go for it because they have a fear of litigation - thus the component they like is the immunity part. The lack of a court order to transfer the data to the government is unconstitutional but I have not seen any SCOTUS cases striking down the bush/CHENEY era "PATRIOT Act"
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  644. Thank you for introducing me to Samuel Moyn - he sounds interesting and also wrote a book about Lévinas' concept of the Other (or as Lévinas wrote it l'autre, l'autrui, l'Autre or l'Autrui) which is a fascinating topic as well.
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  645. BTW I always learnt the gradual improvement model of history as the "Whig Interpretation of History" but that might be because my education was in 1970s and 1980s when my teachers used those sort of terms because that was what was fashionable when they were being educated.
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  646. It is all about shifting the Overton Window rightward into crazy town.
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  647. Michele Bachmann is not going to get very far in this primary season - she hasn't got any answers to tough questions - and just uses the repeat a statement that you want to make - when this happened in Britain - the conservative minister who did it lost the election badly - I hope America is similar in this respect.
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  648. You make some interesting assumptions about "taxing the hell out of the rich", "they will move there (sic) money to another country" and "you are part of the problem in our country!!" - who said anyone will tax the hell out of the rich, who said they can and will move their money abroad and which country are you referring to. I live in Germany and I suspect you do not.
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  649. It is easy to be a libertarian when you are a fit healthy teenager or in your early twenties - when you think you are invincible and are not going to die. When health problems kick in we all seem to change our minds at least in private.
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  650. As Gandhi said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." we have done the ignoring, the laughing and now the fighting has started and all the dirty tactics are being deployed as usual.
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  651. Although in the UK there are laws against disrupting Anglican church services there is also a requirement that churches should allow people on their premises and given this church is a tax-free organisation not allow people on the premises seems contradictory to their evangelical mission.
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  652. Sarah Palin was so kind to Katie Couric that she fluffed her lines so badly so Katie Couric's name would take off and she would be famous as the woman who interviewed a moron who thought she could be vice-president.
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  653. Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund: Sotomayor served on the board of directors for this controversial group from 1980 to 1992. PRLDEF is a New York-based public-interest law group that works to remove discrimination against Latinos through advocacy and legislative endeavors. Some of its most radical efforts include attacking New York Mayor David Dinkins for labeling three Puerto Ricans who shot five members of Congress assassins, ... Could this be the bit you were looking for?
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  654. Is having read at present five versions of a thousand page bill going to make you a better legislator or is having your staff and advisers do it and tell you which bits to read and understand and which to ignore - possibly because it will never get within your purview as it is something that will die in the other house. The fetishising of reading all bills personally and only then being allowed to remain in office misses the point of how legislation making works.
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  655. @psychawareness - actually he was saying that evil people use religion for their own purposes and not for any "higher" reason
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  656. And virtually every western European country could have told the US military that repealing DADT would have zero impact as they have had an equal military for at least ten years.
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  657. I googled it after my last message and I am unsure how she and her daughter could be helped by the police per se. The problem was a community one and everyone stood round wringing their hands after the suicides and said she was weeping and distraught but no-one offered to stand with her against the bullies. It would need so community mediation and I am not sure the Leicestershire Constabulary are equiped for this. Would you pay more tax to fund that?
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  658. The first non-mainframe computer I used at college in the early 1980s was a cp/m machine which was used for writing up theses.
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  659. Have Fox "News" actually broken a story themselves because they historically have a zero rating on breaking stories - this is classic - let's re-write the evidence to suit our agenda and our viewers will be ignorant and not check themselves what has happened.
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  660. I believe that this person Victoria Jackson is showing more signs of acting in what she calls a sinful way (which I believe the end of Romans 1 in the bible is referring to) than the Democrat party platform.
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  661. Can anyone see the cogs whirring in his head. At least he is doing his homework but he does sound like a C grade student.
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  662. Are we talking about tweets? No we are talking about the ability of a president to stay in control. The message I get is that he has no idea what his campaign are doing and that would not bode well for a Ron Paul presidency.
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  663. Interestingly children have been shown to be better at answering mathematics questions of you put it in money terms.
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  664. And I suspect that Santorum has a publicly funded education. Can we rip that out of his head?
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  665. I am fascinated by the use of "unAmerican" in the political lexicon of the USA - no other country uses the word "unX" to describe their political foes.
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  666. The Republicans when they see a wounded animal will go in for the kill and but Rush Limbaugh needs to be shown to be seriously wounded then they will pile in on him etc.
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  667. I use Linux and downloaded them and did a conversion job and uploaded them to my Tolino. It was easier for me than other folks have found.
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  668. So a Home Secretary who is forbidden by her own Prime Minister from policy meetings about immigration because she'll f**k it up is not in the "Coalition of Chaos"?
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  669. The headline figure for Corporate Tax is bizarrely high and has hardly been altered even when the Republicans have controlled the House and Senate. Then you look at the fact that as a percentage of GDP the Corporate Tax has been dropping - now that is interesting and implies that the Legislature has been altering the effective tax rate by granting lots of loopholes so the headline rate is very misleading indeed.
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  670. @dragon8me2 but the rich would hire good accountants and find some loopholes.
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  671. The interesting thing is Cenk doesn't seem aware that the legal system in the UK is a sister to the US system and unlike the rest of the European Union. We share common law. I agree that low research leads to sensationalist material - perhaps they will review this one on air today?
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  672. @RedSoxWSAgain No, Ron Paul is not mad wanting to audit the Federal Reserve - but Ron Paul is mad in many other ways - his public declarations on creationism are enough to cast him into the outer darkness.
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  673. The idea that people don't want to live in a house that someone else has lived in is so American as in Europe you cannot help but live in old houses and here in Germany Altbau (old houses basically 100 years old or more) are the most sought after.
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  674. Here we get "a letter from Flensburg" if you get caught speeding and you pay the fine. Flensburg is a city on the German Danish border where the headquarters for speed cameras is based. I speeded in Hesse in a car-sharing car and they paid the penalty and billed us.
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  675. In the USA tipping is a big deal - in other countries where there are effective minimum wages etc tipping is less or for good service or not expected. The problem is what the pastor wrote on his check - I would love to hear his sermon on Matthew 25:31-45 - that would be entertaining.
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  676. Frighteningly Piers Morgan as a journalist and television presenter in the UK - was a disgrace and well out of mainstream. I suspect he hasn't changed much but in the wacky world of American politics he comes across as coherent and sensible.
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  677. @ethosflux - I tried to send this to you personally but you have friend lock on: I just realised when I visited your channel page that you are a Pat Condell fan - and have featured his misleading and scurrilous video on the so called "ground-zero mosque" I assume you like Pat Condell have little interest in history and truth and are more interested in being bigots and getting on your imaginary high horses for effect.
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  678. There are SO many shots of the current governor of Florida where he does not look human
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  679. @nilbud He is linked to the French Communist Party - more directly than you can make a connection between Obama and the French Communist Party - at least in the Beckian universe.
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  680. The best pizza experience I've had was a pizza restaurant in Tana Bru in Northern Norway about 70° N It was run by a Turkish family and they made the nicest garlic bread because it was basically Turkish flatbread with garlic. Pizza is better when the temperatures are low outside!
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  681. White zig-zag road markings are typically found either side of pedestrian crossings. They indicate that parking and overtaking in these zones is strictly prohibited so that the view is not obstructed for pedestrians. They were placed at either side of the Zebra (an American Ped Xing - you and your Chinese names LOL) crossings in 1971 and they were then added to Pelican crossings (PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled crossing) much later during the 1980s. So the lights you see are to enable pedestrians to cross. BTW - once or twice a year I had to go to Swindon and the location I had to go to was close to the Magic Roundabout. It was straight forward to use as long as you saw it as FIVE mini-roundabouts (where roundabout rules apply) linked together.
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  682. @TerryEFV2 I obviously don't know Mom and I don't think I want to know her.
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  683. It reminds me of being in China in the 1990s as a mature student trains in China then were like those or more specifically the "hard sleeper class" constant hot water, lots of chat with other passengers I was mistaken for a Russian on the train because someone thought the book I was reading was in Russian It wasn't but I used my two sentences of Russian as I was approached by a Professor of Russian and I said Я не говорю по русски я англичанин and he switched into British English he was also a professor of English too.
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  684. I am interested in your negative assessment of the US government - I am not sure I share your assessment but I do note that the US constitution reflects the time of writing whereas the other countries more often have changed to have removed the powers of the executive and made the parliament more powerful. This change in the balance of powers towards the elected members of the elected house has made the governments more efficient than the US model.
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  685. My thoughts turn to a Bayesian approach to truth as the theory, as this meat suit in this neck of the woods understands, never rules out anything completely. Your thoughts would be welcome on this.
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  686. Trollope, who invented the post-box, in later life regretted it as he thought that it enabled women to carry on illicit affairs more easy as they could anonymously post letters rather than had them to a servant to take to the post-office. His fears were just as groundless as this councils.
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  687. One of the first signs of the Conservative government ideological collapse into a heap in Britain in the 1990s - was that they in 1993 had a campaign of "condemn more, understand less" and they were rightly pilloried by all right-thinking people as idiots the labour party who were in the ascendency at the time were saying "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" - that played much better with the electorate.
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  688. I was pointing out that the Republican senator from Oklahoma' s plan was logically equivalent to socialised medicine.
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  689. There are nine states plus the District of Columbia with equal marriage laws in the USA as of 01 January 2013 not three as Desi said. They are: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Maine, Maryland and Washington.
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  690. Small ones I associate with birthday parties as a kid. You can make a Beef Wellington for the festive season. Basically a giant posh sausage roll LOL
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  691. The Martin family as far as I am aware have not made things up like the broken nose etc. They have asked as far as I am aware for justice for their dead son. There is a big coherence between lying for your son and asking for justice.
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  692. some British coins say "Decus et Tutamen" - a decoration and protection which comes from Virgil's Aeneid or perhaps American coins could have "E pluribus unum" on the edge - another Virgil quote. Although I suspect as Sarah Palin does like some US citizens and has I believe called them unAmerican - that would not sit well with her.
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  693. Didn't Morgan Spurlock make a programme about living on minimum wage for 30 days and even for him (a relatively poor film-maker) it was very very hard.
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  694. Laughter is the best deconstruction of Glenn Beck.
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  695. The company is based in Eutin.
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  696. I love the fact people who got burnt believe that they were not thinking positively enough was the reason they got burnt. They, the victims, blame themselves for their burns - the human inference system is a fabulous device in our heads but it does tell us utter rubbish sometimes.
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  697. The etymology of "weapon" is fun: Old English wæpen "instrument of fighting and defense, sword," also "penis," from Proto-Germanic *wæpnan (source also of Old Saxon wapan, Old Norse vapn, Danish vaaben, Old Frisian wepin, Middle Dutch wapen, Old High German wafan, German Waffe "weapon") I like the alternative meaning of "wæpen" as "penis" LOL
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  698. I bought a raspberry pi and to start with I loaded the default GUI OS and I was lost until I opened the terminal and could manipulate things I then discovered that there was a "lite" version and that it was more to my taste because virtually the only gui application I use is a web browser but I have vimium running so it is keyboard driven. I do virtually everything with the keyboard and commandline activities
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  699.  @LetsTalkReligion  If you put in "this is Zhuangzi" into Google translate and go to Chinese this give you: "zhe shi Zhuangzi" and the voice gives you the three retroflex initials zh, sh, zh.
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  700.  @EcclesiastesLiker-py5ts  If you look at my "about" page you will see my rational. It is non-poetry, perhaps in a Zhuangzi way.
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  701. Perhaps this film should be: Conservativism with a captial C Capitalism with a capital C Crackpot with a capital C ... goes off muttering to himself.
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  702. Frighteningly I started on CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language) on punch cards run over night by the local University. I rapidly outgrew that trying to do basic primary factors of numbers. So I moved to Fortran IV It was the mid-seventies and the school had one computer for the computer studies class.
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  703. Might she not do for California and the United States what she did for HP - halve its stock value and alienate their engineers and customers?
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  704. @803brando Interesting question - in their logic - it is a private school and not providing a public service - as the public school system exists. Thus they can do what they like - so the racist school can in theory exist - usually however they are more circumspect than that.
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  705. I am not sure where you get your figures for Corporate taxation levels - historically they seem to be at an all time low and in comparison within the OECD they are the low if not the lowest.
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  706. @TerryEFV2 No Gandhi would have said somthing witty to put him down like. The one I am thinking of here is: "What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea. "
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  707. The conservative right lack empathy - and the social dimension is consistently missing in their thinking. That is their achilles heel.
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  708. @ethosflux Since 1949 I believe the German State has killed significantly fewer people than the USA has. The Federal Constitution written in 1949 has some of the best human rights provisions that cannot be removed from the law under any circumstances.
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  709. In 1924 Werner Heisenberg to escape his hay-fever visited Heligoland and arrived while there Quantum Mechanics When he got back to Göttingen his supervisor Max Born checked his work and confirmed it wasa viable theory The principles of which we still use.
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  710. @Shigeru11298 - can I say - I think the lady is running as a conservative Republican not as a Conservative Party candidate. I think the interesting idea is that the stock plummeted, the customers and engineers were haemorrhaging out the door and she got a large payment for this and to leave. The point is that she won out of the situation not the customers, engineers or stockholders. Also I can ruin a company for $20m, could you do that?
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  711. Dr Terence Kealey isn't just a "pervy prof" he is the "pervy" vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham who seems to have taken some leaves out of the book of Howard Kirk in the History Man by Ray Bradbury - so it does sound rather 1970s LOL
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  712. Evan Bayh will be the cover that Fox "News" needs as then they can say they are "fair and balanced" because ex-senator Bayh is with us. All I can hear is the sound of Evan Bayh's snout in the trough.
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  713. Did Trump want to charge for using his image?
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  714. did the O'Reilly Factor do their promised hatchet job on CNN?
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  715. The problem is that the people who work at Fox "News" do not believe the rubbish they are peddling but they keep delivering it up to their audience. They may personally be honourable people but they allow this immoral cr*p on screen and delude people wilfully.
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  716. @bohemianwriter1 I think that the Welsh might disagree they were incorporated into the legal entity of "England and Wales" in 1534 and that was by a "Welsh" King Henry VIII - descended from the welsh Tudor family. The union with Scotland was under the Scottish royal family the Stuarts. The first place that the needs to be colonised is closer to home - the first English colony was England and it will be the last too.
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  717. Weirdly the Lipton brand of tea is available worldwide except in Britain where the owners of the brand prefer to market tea as "PG Tips" So I only first encountered Lipton Yellow Label Tea when I travelled to Europe from Britain. My mother famously described its quality as that of "sweepings of the floor" LOL
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  718. The quote in full from Justice Thurgood Marshall was: "the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today." He delivered it on the bicentennial of the writing of the constitution of the USA and it is indeed correct in its interpretation
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  719. An interesting story I come from a non-religious background culturally Christian but the family didn't go to Church I became knowledgeable of the iconography and some practices because to navigate Western European culture (note: my parents took me to visit art galleries, museums stately homes and churches most weekends) and understand the literatures of Europe I needed to know some Christianity. I as a teenager developed to the consternation of my parents religious impulses - reading the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist texts as well as reading Nietzsche as well as Bertrand Russell and then the logical positivists Weirdly the book "Language, Truth and Logic" by A. J. Ayer (a book attacking metaphysics amongst other things) made me realise that I had a "bias for God" With a long journey I made it to Quakerism where I stayed for 25 years where I focused on the theologies of church governance, ecumenical understanding and inter-faith dialogue. I drifted away when I moved to Germany though I married my partner at the Quaker meeting I had called home. That drift and failure to connect to a new "family" in Germany led to me adopting my current faith of Sikhi.
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  720. @PsychoPunk1965 The Labour Party in Britain has always had more to do with Methodism than with Marxism.
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  721. More people have died than have seen this movie. It is appalling.
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  722. investments are all about trust as no-one is an expert in every field - Bernie Madoff (love his name - he Madoff with the money) was a scam artist whose scam worked for at least ten years and possibly over twenty years.
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  723. and the subsequent deflation would kill the US economy dead in the water. The gold standard has been dead since the early 1970s under Nixon - who effectively ended the Bretton Woods Agreement by doing that.
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  724. The cost to the state of her imprisonment must seriously outweigh her guilt. Three strikes and you are out is bad law and bad practice.
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  725. @ecwaufisxtreme "Oh no, not again" as the bowl of petunias thought as it fell to the surface of the planet Magarathea.
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  726. I love the way Cenk gets interested in the idea of coffee enemas LOL
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  727. wrt the right to pray - I wonder what would happen if you claimed sacrificing my first born up a mountain was my form of praying to God, I bet the state would be down on me like a ton of bricks.
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  728. Interesting but as a teenager in Britain in the 1970s studying history as part of a "compulsory minimum" I learnt about the Spanish-American War of 1898 and understood it as a continuation of "Manifest Destiny" having got to fill out the Pacific coast. And the scrabble by Western powers for an empire. Perhaps being from a large Imperial power Britain saw the same desires in the USA amongst the elites at least for a place in the "imperial sun"
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  729. Are they loading debt on this company to make write-offs when it tanks?
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  730. In Britain, a doctor who doesn't want to provide a service for moral reasons that is permissible. The requirement however is this that the doctor has to refer the patient to a doctor who can help them. The failure to help by referring to another doctor is morally despicable - didn't Jesus have something to say about people who kept their own consciences clear and failed to help people. I thought that was his message to the world.
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  731. @jeffxl12 I agree that many businesses can be lucrative - I think Cenk is indulging in some, as we in Germany say, Schadenfreude.
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  732. And they hope that no-one remembers the other prediction - and it is therefore an unfalsifiable system - but unfalsifiable systems are as we have found useless to solving problems.
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  733. The Mayor of London who has been elected in the local election on May 2 is a Muslim. He has been Mayor of London for 8 years and this was his third term as mayor. He was elected first in 2016 when the forty-fifth president was elected and has even grown his majority this time around. Is that who Chip Roy from Texas is worried about?
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  734. @ericaj58 I stand corrected - I am not a US citizen but it seems that she is ineligible as she does not have the right paperwork - and I am an alien in my country of residence and am aware that I for example can vote in some elections i.e. local and european ones because I am a EU citizen but cannot vote in the federal and state elections in Germany.
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  735. However if you are saying your opponent is not really fiscally conservative people are more likely to look at the loss of value of the stock during her tenure as CEO - that was a disaster and that is a big chunk of her record - I would be worried if someone came to me and said - I have wiped 56% of the value of your holding while in office - the cost to get rid of me is $20m
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  736. @Colingoesfast Interestingly she attacks others for using teleprompters and then writes on her hand. She appears to be a good speech deliverer but when she writes her own speeches she is bad and in interviews she is attrocious. In a political system where the president is selected on personality as much as policy - the personality is not there with Sarah Palin - she is a hollow shell.
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  737. @Steve197201 1999- 2005 S&P 500 went down 15% - yes there was a decline but in the same period HP went down 54% - that is not a good record by anyone's estimation - if I were a board member selecting a CEO - I would not go for Ms Fiorina with that record and it might count against her in the primary, or do you disagree?
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  738. The most effective interrogation techniques are to get to know the people - torture does not work - people lie to stop torture - you don't get anywhere with it.
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  739.  @nancyjay790  There was rewriting of the dates as "corrections" were made The dates went on through to 1845 The net result was splits in interpretation as well as people leaving the movement.
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