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POLITICS:
Has CNN finally got it (almost) right about why Trump won: and better yet, why Sanders would have won?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/opinions/why-trump-won-zakaria/index.html

Reasons:
1. The first is capitalism. There was a time when the American economy moved in tandem with its middle class. As the economy grew, so did middle class employment and wages. But over the last few decades that link has been broken. The economy has been humming along, but it now enriches mostly those with education, training, and capital. The other Americans have been left behind.

2. The second divide is about culture. In recent decades, we've seen large scale immigration; African-Americans and Hispanics rising to a more central place in society; and gays being accorded equal rights. All of this has meant new cultures and narratives have received national attention. And it's worried a segment of the older, white population, which fears that the national culture they grew up with is fading.

3. The third divide in America today is about class. The Trump vote is in large part an act of class rebellion, a working class revolt against know-it-all elites who run the country.

4. The final C in this story is communication. We have gone from an America where people watched three networks that provided a uniform view of the world to one where everyone can pick their own channel, message, and now even their own facts.

The first one is spot on: the divide is greater and there is a feeling (a Truth!) about the rich enriching themselves at the poors' expense: the Trickle down effect that is a failure (except if you are rich: it is a success).

The second: yes, people are scared if they are intolerant and susceptible to prejudice. (But i think this is much more about job loss than anything else).

The third is why HILLARY lost: the entrenched elite looking out for themselves and their friends is why the first one (Capitalism) came about. People are tired of elites looking out for elites, rich enriching rich. THIS IS WHY THEY SHOULD HAVE RUN SANDERS. Hillary was elite looking out for elite: Trump portrayed himself as the outsider who would shake things up and look out for the 'little guy' (true or not STILL has to be seen).
If they had run Sanders, i believe the Dems would have won.

Four: this is just a truism. Will CNN look at this and start reinvigorating itself and re-imaging itself as a bastion of real news?
.......ummmmm..... well i won't hold my breath.

CNN has it at least half right, but they are still skirting around the issue: Trump won because people distrusted Hillary to do anything but look after herself and her friends. In other words,

Hillary represented status quo: same old, same old.
Trump represented change (not Obama change, but change).

In my view/belief, Sanders represented the change people looked to Trump for: i believe Sanders would have done MUCH better than Hillary and would have won.

Rant on, Snidely. Rant on.

U.S. military detects WMD HIGHLY unusual submarine activity from North Korea:

What is the U.S. up to? Will there be a 'final solution to the North Korean problem'? Is there going to be some 'unusual military activity' from the US military in the N.K area?

Popcorn at 11, bring butter for your news: you may need it for easier insertion.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/politics/north-korea-ejection-test-submarine-activity/index.html

Can we believe ANYTHING we are told by the U.S. military/Government after sooooooo many lies?
Will America finally start realizing that EVENTUALLY lies stop being believed after so many cries about wolf?

Will Roger stop fooling around on Mary with Paul? Will Hammond Industries keep itself from bankruptcy by killing George the CEO? Will Mary's psychiatrist tell his priest about Mary really being Paul?
STAY TUNED..... SAME. BAT. TIME....... SAME. BAT. CHANNEL!

Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman said on Monday that the free movement between United Kingdom and EU will end in March 2019.

Get those consulting gigs complete by then.. :p

A few weeks ago I received a mysterious letter in the snail mail purporting to be from a certain PC Plod of Her Majesty's Constabulary informing me in somewhat stilted and ungrammatical English (Mrs Turgid teaches English at a secondary school and was highly amused) that he would like to speak to me regarding a inappropriate comment made on a UK web forum from an IP address apparently registered in my name. The method of communication requested was quite strange. PC Plod wanted to know my phone number so that he could speak to me in person. PC Plod managed to find my snail mail address, so this was a bit fishy, to say the least.

Smelling a rat, I decided to proceed with caution and to entertain the possibility that this may have been some kind of hoax.

Being a bit of a commie I'm a member of a trade union and have access to free lawyers, so I contacted them. I was granted a telephone conversation with a lawyer who was both very helpful and knowledgeable. I am not a lawyer, and what follows in not legal advice. I am paraphrasing from a conversation that happened many weeks ago.

The lawyer agreed that the wording of the letter was very strange. I made the point that I was quite distressed by it since I am not in the habit of intentionally stirring up trouble, certainly not of a violent kind and certainly nothing that would attract the attention of the police. She conjectured that if it wasn't a hoax, perhaps the police had imagined that someone using my network may have said something contravening the Malicious Communications Act. We both discussed that fact that a lot of subjectivity is involved when trying to argue that something is in breach of the Act and that this has implications for Free Speech. To put it a bit more bluntly, just because PC Plod takes issue with something that doesn't mean that a Court of Law would. It would be expensive and time-consuming for them to prove so. And we are still innocent until proven guilty in England and Wales.

She discussed the circumstances under which a police officer may speak to a member of the public. If a police officer has reason to speak to you regarding a suspected crime or such, you should be interviewed under caution and have the right to legal representation. What you discuss will be written down and signed. If the police officer wishes to speak to you in connection with a civil matter, they have no business doing so. They should not be investigating. Lawyers deal directly with that sort of thing. Finally, apparently, a police officer may wish to speak to you unofficially to offer "a few friendly words of advice." Communicating with the police by phone is a bad idea since you have no idea who you are really speaking to at the other end. You also have no idea whether the call is being recorded, whether there are other people listening in, or whether it is being transcribed.

So a letter was written back to this mysterious PC Plod expressing surprise, concern and asking for more information.

Eventually came the reply. PC Plod glibly and arrogantly stated that a message posted from somewhere behind my router broke Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act but that he had no idea who posted it. Upon looking at the pseudonym under which the message was posted, I suspected satire. The name suggested a certain amount of reactionary bad temper and perhaps a degree of non-conformity perhaps relating to ethnicity, the sort of thing that your typical alt-wrong snowflake would have difficulty with. Looking at the actual message and the discussion under which it was posted, it was patently obvious that it was satire, highly condensed, but in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The problem is, apart from the fact that PC Plod is poorly educated, not particularly familiar with the political culture of his own country, has no concept of context, but this particular forum has a major design flaw in that moderators may remove comments, thereby removing any context in which other comments may have been made.

PC Plod did indeed offer some friendly advice on Internet security and signed of with a thinly-veiled threat.

Let me just finish by pointing out that this "grossly offensive" comment was pretty tame compared with the stuff EthanolFueled and TheMightyBuzzard and even Runaway1956 post sometimes around here.

The ride failure at the Ohio State Fair, USA on 2017-07-26 that killed one 18-year old:
WKYC Channel 3: Verify: How safe are the rides here in Ohio?

This investigation by the news outlet notes at 2:20 something interesting. Namely that the swing arm shows signs of metal fatigue. Maybe someone will take a metal grain microscopy of the surfaces. It ought to tell a lot.

Coca-Cola Revamps Coke Zero

Coca-Cola to replace Coke Zero in U.S.

Coca-Cola is killing Coke Zero as we know it — and people are freaking out

What, no stevia?

I would submit this, but like, nah.

Here's one. Suppose you were a Three Letter Agency and you needed to break some strong encryption. Now say that the cost of the hardware to do that was prohibitive (it's not likely to be invented for several decades, for example) but you remembered that millions of people were running "grid computing" (remember that term) applications on their home computers with juicy GPUs (e.g. Folding@Home). Do you reckon you could get some secret code deployed by those projects to help you break that encryption in parallel right under the noses of J. Random Citizen?

There Was a Ceooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House
David Erik Nelson
July-August Fantasy & Science Fiction

I finally caught up on my reading, and the latest F&SF magazine has the best novella I've read in a long time. It will be on sale until September 4.

When I first started reading it, the thought occurred to me that the author was trying to cash in on last year's bogus controversy about black writers not being published (how would an editor know?), and perhaps he was, but it's a great story none the less. It starts out in Detroit with a black locksmith with four years of architectural training under his belt, and a large white man who is slightly retarded. They work for a real estate agent, who has just bought the house. Their jobs are to check it out.

Before they get close, they're hassled by the cops, with the locksmith in handcuffs until he shows his certification as a locksmith and his license for "burglar tools". The cops leave, the locksmith picks the lock, and his training tells him the door is installed backwards.

He steps inside and falls out the back door. I thought then that it was a remake of an old Heinlein story, especially after several such attempts, but it wasn't anything like that at all. They call the boss, who comes out and sees the oddities himself, and curses. He gives the locksmith a silver key.

Later, having met a foreign toourist who complained that there's nothing interesting to photograph, offers to show her the house. He uses the key--and the door opens from the other side. They go in, and it really starts getting wierd. Books by authors who didn't write them, like a memoir of William Shatner written in Esperanto, and the fact that outside the windows isn't Detroit. And a sneaker with a foot still in it.

Not to give too much awy, it involves superior creatures from... another dimention? I was two thirds of the way through it before I could see it was science fiction.

I plan on nominating it for a Hugo next year. It's well worth the cost of the magazine.

blanket pardoning.
Gives criminals the power to pardon cminals.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40692709