SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
"I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump."
I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.
...
The college students in our research told an average of two lies a day, and the community members told one. (A more recent study of the lies 1,000 U. S. adults told in the previous 24 hours found that people told an average of 1.65 lies per day; the authors noted that 60 percent of the participants said they told no lies at all, while the top 5 percent of liars told nearly half of all the falsehoods in the study.) The most prolific liar among the students told an average of 6.6 lies a day. The biggest liar in the community sample told 4.3 lies in an average day.
In Trump’s first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post’s tally. That’s about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump’s false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.
Kepler Announcement on Dec. 14
NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery
NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.
NASA and Google are both users of the D-Wave "quantum annealer", ostensibly for machine learning purposes.
Cheeto Jesus, Speaker of Truth
CNN ran an article yesterday full of butthurt that Cheeto Jesus has been keeping too many of his campaign promises. I figured I'd share it with you lot so the regressive progtards among you could share in the butthurt too.
A politician who actually does what he told voters he would do seems almost unfathomable in Washington, a town of broken promises. For Donald Trump, being a president who delivers is especially crucial, since it's one of the golden keys to his so far unbreakable bond with supporters.
The need to live up to that image helps explain why Trump, who is under ever-increasing pressure from the Russia investigation, on Wednesday recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital despite the widely acknowledged risks.
It was just the latest instance of the President obstinately honoring the bumper-sticker vows he made to his ultra-loyal supporters -- even those that horrify the political and foreign policy establishment, media critics and allied leaders.
Have a nice weekend argument. I may or may not have time to step in and egg things on further, we'll just have to wait and see.
Porn Star May Have Been Cyberbullied Into Committing Suicide
What is August Ames Cause of Death? Porn Star Found Dead After Cyberbullying
Adult film star August Ames was found dead in her California home on Tuesday, according to BuzzFeed. The erotic actress, who appeared in over 270 films, was 23 years old.
The Canadian actress’s official cause of death has yet to be released by the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office due to pending family notifications. However, some members of the porn industry believe Ames, whose birth name was Mercedes Grabowski, may have taken her own life.
Just two days before Ames’s death, the porn star was a victim of cyberbullying after she posted a tweet on Sunday saying she refused to perform with a male actor who did gay pornography.
Shortly after Ames’s comments about working with "crossover performers"—porn stars who appear in gay and heterosexual scenes—she was bombarded with angry tweets accusing her of discriminating against the LGBTQ community and being anti-gay.
Ames defended her stance, writing that she was not homophobic, but decided not to shoot with men who have done gay porn for health reasons. “I’m not putting my body at risk, I don’t know what they do in their private lives,” she wrote.
A $300 Bil. Mistake in the Handwritten Tax Bill, shocking!
It appears that Senate Republicans managed to make a $289 billion or so mistake while furiously hand-scribbling edits onto the tax bill they passed in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The problem involves the corporate alternative minimum tax, which the GOP initially planned to repeal, but tossed back into their stew at the last second in order to raise some desperately needed revenue. The AMT is basically a parallel tax code meant to prevent companies from zeroing out their IRS bills. It doesn’t allow businesses to take as many tax breaks but, in theory, is also supposed to have a lower rate.
Except not under the Senate bill. When Mitch McConnell & co. revived the AMT, they absentmindedly left it at its current rate of 20 percent, the same as the new, lower rate of the corporate income tax that the bill included. As a result, many companies won’t be able to use tax breaks that were supposed to be preserved in the legislation, including the extremely popular credit for research and development costs. Corporate accountants started freaking out about this over the weekend, but the situation reached high farce when a group of lawyers from Davis Polk pointed out that, by leaving the AMT intact, Republicans had essentially undermined their bill’s most important changes to the international tax code.
Therese Dreaming
One More Day to Vote for 2014 MU69 Names
Republicans Broke Congress?
Man Takes Over Waffle House From Sleeping Employee
Auschwitz Notes from Hell
The BBC has a story about the discovery of a diary left by an Auschwitz victim.
Marcel Nadjari was a Greek Jew interned at Auschwitz and forced by the Nazis to escort fellow Jews to the gas chambers, burn the bodies, collect gold fillings, women's hair and to dispose of their ashes in a nearby river.
Realising that their own murder was only a matter of time, the Jewish slaves of the Sonderkommando documented their experiences secretly. Nadjari put his manuscripts in a thermos flask in a leather pouch and buried it near Crematorium III.
The flask was discovered by a Polish forestry student 36 years after it was buried.
Nadjari survived Auschwitz, but his parents and sister were murdered in another camp.
