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Trump's Swamp Things Support Forced Arbitration
Remember how he wasn't going to be beholden to Wall Street's interests?
U.S. Posts Its Largest Budget Deficit Since 2013
Remember when Republicans cared about the deficit? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
U.S. Posts Its Largest Budget Deficit Since 2013
GOP Congress Presides Over Highest Spending Since Obama’s Stimulus
Goody Goody Nom Nom
Just what is this abomination, "nom nom?" Where has it come from and why is it on my television? "Yum yum," surely?
One doesn't say, "Goody goody nom nom." When was that last time that you declared that meal was, "Nommy?"
Yummy. Food is yummy. When one eats one goes, "Yum yum."
Donald Trump Thinks the Freedom of the Press Is ‘Disgusting’
Donald Trump has pledged to defend the Constitution — even an article that doesn’t exist — but he can’t seem to lay off that pesky First Amendment.
Trump has mocked the First Amendment’s right to freedom of religion by calling for a ban on Muslims from entering the country and criticized those who believe in the freedom of speech as “foolish people.” He has also endorsed attacks on protesters and the imprisonment of people who burn the flag.
And he has made it very clear that he doesn’t stand for the freedom of the press. As a presidential candidate, Trump told supporters he would “open up our libel laws” to sue journalists. “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” he promised.
Trump the candidate also blacklisted reporters and entire news outlets from campaign events, referred to journalists as “scum” and “slime,” and mocked a reporter for having a disability. He vowed to sue women who reported incidents of sexual harassment and assault, along with the outlets that covered their accounts, and threatened a lawsuit against a Hispanic journalist group for calling out his bigoted remarks.
"I would never kill them but I do hate them,” he said of reporters. “And some of them are such lying, disgusting people.”
This onslaught didn’t stop once Trump assumed the presidency. From the most powerful perch on the planet, he has continued to wage attacks on the free press, further revealing his authoritarian impulses and disdain for the First Amendment.
Below we provide a running list of the attacks that the president has made on the press since assuming office. We’ll keep this list updated since, unfortunately, we don’t expect them to stop.
Trump has:
Said it is “frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write” in a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Threatened to cancel the broadcast licenses of media companies that offer negative coverage of him.
Had the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, call on ESPN to fire Jemele Hill for criticizing him.
Tweeted mocking images of him wrestling a CNN reporter and his campaign hitting a CNN reporter with a train.
Overseen a Justice Department review of policies for subpoenaing media organizations in an effort to crack down on both whistleblowers and journalists.
Pledged to “fight the #FakeNews” with a Polish leader hostile to press freedom.
Attacked reporters while speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has fostered a climate of violence against journalists.
Said that his mission to “drain the swamp” begins “with the Fake News!”
Reportedly asked then-FBI Director James Comey to jail reporters who publish classified information.
Tasked his former chief of staff with looking into changing the country’s libel laws.
Explored the prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing CIA and State Department materials.
Labeled the “fake news” media “the enemy of the people.”
Accused the media of lying about his “very nice” conversation with the Australian prime minister. Ultimately, a leaked transcript of the call showed it was Trump who was lying.
Urged someone to buy the New York Times to “either run it correctly or let it fold.”
While Trump tries to portray journalists at the “enemies” of Americans, it’s his attacks on the press that amount to an assault on the cornerstone of American democracy: the First Amendment.
Donald Trump Thinks the Freedom of the Press Is ‘Disgusting’
This Republican Lawmaker is already drafting legislation to violate that pesky 1st Amendment.
Donald Trump finally identified some Fake News!
The fake story really was fake.... As in, the story he was denouncing never actually existed in the first place.
Trump denounces as ‘fake news’ a news report that didn’t happen
Uncle Dick - World Class Pyromaniac
(This post is unrelated to the ongoing topics of audio, video, networking and electronics. This post is a personal addendum to a SoylentNews book review.)
An unexpected bonus from reading Ignition - An Informal History Of Liquid Rocket Propellants by Dr. John D. Clark was a possible family connection. I could never place "Uncle Dick" in my family tree. Perhaps he was an honorary relative. Perhaps my redneck family crashed a wedding or something. Regardless, I've had a first-hand account of wire-guided missile development and a first-hand explanation of the criteria for a supersonic airframe. Until reading Ignition, I assumed these were unrelated developments. However, I now understand these topics to be part of a Cold War weapon development program.
I may have the details wrong but "Uncle Dick" was a junior member of a team who had access to a military firing range for one week. They had some surplus tanks from World War 2 which were in moderate condition. Someone at the hot end of the range (crazy people) rigged each tank so that it would drive itself across the range while the rest of team fired at it. He said that being paid to destroy tanks with his own design of rocket launcher was one of the best working weeks of his life. Within my family, he had a reputation for being a pyromaniac due to his account of this and other incidences.
When he said to me that the launcher had a spool of wire, I thought that he was another distant relative with a dry sense of humor. Surely, it is best to fire where the tank will be. This would be the shortest and fastest route. However, distance and fuel conservation aren't concerns. Furthermore, a wire-guided missile allows an infantry grunt to trivially adjust the direction of a missile to compensate for changes to the target's speed after the missle has been fired. This is such a useful concept that it was further developed into the laser-guided weapon.
I may have the details wrong but "Uncle Dick" was a more senior member of a team which developed aerospace grade titanium. A supersonic aircraft requires a large block of titanium to be extruded. This eliminates welding. This increases strength. It also provides another essential property. A titanium frame must have zero air bubbles and zero water bubbles. This cannot be guaranteed if there is welding. The problem is quite severe. When an aircraft goes supersonic, friction from the air may cause oxygen in an air or water bubble to catalyze with titanium. A cavity to the exterior would cause a runaway reaction. The end result would be a very large firework and a dead crew.
When I last saw "Uncle Dick", he said that the first person to solve the semiconductor heating problem would be a trillionaire. Since then, I've keenly followed reversible computing and quantum computing.
HTML lists
Powers-that-lurk:
Tried to incorporate an <ol> list in a post today, but it failed to work properly. I wrote:
<ol type="A">
<li>Thing</li>
<li>Another thing</li>
</ol>
What I got:
1. Thing
2. Another thing
What I should have gotten:
A. Thing
B. Another thing
I request that you fix the tag so that this works. I presume the original HTML tag construct is preferable to allowing limited CSS styles, but if that was also available, that'd be okay too. I'm also making the assumption that CSS styles are not currently available, which I suppose could be wrong. :)
If you're in there making <ol> work anyway, probably should also address "start=X" and "reversed" as well.
One of the things I really like about Soylent is that it works better than That Other Place. More, please.
Thanks.
The Walmart subsidies
The argument has since spread all over the place and been used to rationalize all sorts of taxes, minimum wage increases, etc.
There is a rat's nest of nasty deception in this argument which needs to be considered. Even if we ignore that this is based on a sloppy propaganda white paper (extrapolating from a single store to the entire US) by a political faction, we still have some really big flaws with the argument.
The first is simply that the point of subsidies is to encourage behavior we want. Walmart is employing poor people. Usually, that is a desirable goal, particularly for the ideologies that spin this as welfare subsidies, but notice how in this case virtue is transformed rhetorically into vice.
Second, anyone who employs people who receive welfare is by this argument receiving the subsidy. The only way to avoid the alleged subsidy is to employ people who never receive any sort of welfare. Thus, anyone who employs poor people can be accused of this vice.
Thus third, it can't be fixed as long as one pays out welfare benefits of any sort. There is no correction that can ever get rid of the alleged problem because either someone will always employ poor people on welfare and run afoul of the welfare subsidy or no one will, creating a permanent unemployed class of people.
I see this causing problems for universal basic income schemes because since everyone receives the income, every employer can be considered to be "subsidized" and thus subject to whatever crazy scheme or punishment that can be rationalized. It's another failure mode that needs to be considered with UBI systems.
Happy End of the World
I think I may have figured out at last what is making the Human Race so unhappy, and it's not just to do with chasing after little green pieces of paper. It occurred to me recently, but I'm getting rather forgetful these days. Let me see if I can remember.
