[jogs]

According to Emmit Stussy a person is only lying when he knows he's lying. When the elitist progressive left and Trump disagrees, the left loves to claim Trump is lying. Trump is not lying. Sometimes the left is lying. MSNBC and CNN are routinely lying. NY Times and Wash Post lies using unnamed sources, which cannot be crossed examined.
Comey vs. Trump. Trump said Comey told Trump three times Trump was not being investigated. Comey confirmed this during the testimony.
Comey: Trump is lying. The left wing media published as a headline on many papers. Trump said the moral of the FBI rank and file is low. Comey claims this is a lie. During Obama administration Comey didn't back his FBI staff. Therefore Comey is the liar.
Drain the swamp. Obviously the democrats are the swamp. But the swamp is really all career politicians. Republicans are also part of the swamp. It's Trump against the entire deep state.

Trump is the only world leader which recognizes the threat from Muslims. May has finally made some statements similar to Trump's. We Trump supporters wish to retain our nation-state status as long as possible. While you Europeans better be prepared to live under Sharia.

[Zelandakh]

jogs, on 2017-June-22, 07:14, said:

According to Emmit Stussy a person is only lying when he knows he's lying.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

jogs, on 2017-June-22, 07:14, said:

Trump is not lying.

Did you really just write that? There are so many documented cases of Trump lies, often enough against himself(!), that even alt-right supporters do not try to make such a claim but rather say such things "look at his deeds not his words" when it suits them. It is certainly the case that not everything that he says is untrue but I would not like to bet my house on even the majority being the truth.

jogs, on 2017-June-22, 07:14, said:

Sometimes the left is lying.

Sometimes yes. It is a matter of scale. If the left makes 20 small lies in a day and Trump lies 100 times with the majority being whoppers, is this equivalent in your eyes? By the same argument, science sometimes gets it wrong, therefore the Bible must be true.

Let us take a recent case - the Iowa rally. Here are the claims from MSNBC, a somewhat left-wing channel as I understand it. I have not personally fact checked any of them. In which cases do you think Trump is lying, which are MSNBC, and which are just disagreement on matters of opinion?

jogs, on 2017-June-22, 07:14, said:

NY Times and Wash Post lies using unnamed sources, which cannot be crossed examined.

Almost all media outlets and information services use unnamed sources from time to time. The police and security services often use anonymous tips too. This is how the world works.

Do you believe that everything he says stands up to even the lightest scrutiny when such sources are taken away?

jogs, on 2017-June-22, 07:14, said:

Comey vs. Trump.

Is this an accurate portrayal of the left-winged media's position? Perhaps you would care to provide a counter-argument for each case.

jogs, on 2017-June-22, 07:14, said:

Trump is the only world leader which recognizes the threat from Muslims. May has finally made some statements similar to Trump's. We Trump supporters wish to retain our nation-state status as long as possible. While you Europeans better be prepared to live under Sharia.

Don't be ridiculous! This statement is about as believeable as the "Trump is not lying" one and I am sure you are well aware of the fact.

Unfortunately Trump's attempts at sounding tough are an excellent recruitment tool for radicals so everyone should be prepared for further attacks during the next 3.5+ years. On the subject of Trump's position on terrorism in general, perhaps you could comment a few words about this article.

[Winstonm]

Obviously, Fox News is better at sourcing than the New York Times or Washington Post.

[Winstonm]

Now I start to see why Trump was so concerned about the validity of his election. From Time:

Quote

The hackers who targeted U.S. state and local election databases last year were successful in altering voter information at least once, officials told Time. Investigators have not yet identified whether Russian agents are behind the alleged alterations. Private data was also stolen, including drivers license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller are looking into whether the Trump campaign received any of the stolen information.

[RedSpawn]

Winstonm, on 2017-June-22, 12:20, said:

Now I start to see why Trump was so concerned about the validity of his election. From Time:

This statement, on its face, warrants more questions:

• What would Trump need with private data such as driver's license numbers and the last 4 digits of people's social security number to win an election? This could be valuable cross reference information to whomever hacked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for all federal employees' data in late 2015. It will help build a more complete profile of government personnel and contractors. Interesting tidbit, fingerprint scans were also stolen from OPM. http://www.nbcnews.c...victims-n437126
  
• So now the Trump campaign is allegedly supposed to have the entire financial backing of the Russian government to alter voter information in (fill in blank) number of states to win an Presidential election?
  
• Who are the organizations, domestic and foreign, both private and public, that have the capabilities and manpower to conduct this hack?
  
• Who stands to benefit from the hacking? Can this information along with other stolen information be used for political blackmail?

Please note that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first started out by saying that it needed to control the airports to make America safe from terrorists. And now DHS says it needs to designate the information and communications technology at the ballot box as critical infrastructure to make us safe from allegedly unknown hackers.

So who's watching DHS to ensure it doesn't abuse its federal oversight of the IT infrastructure behind the ballot box? If DHS has been caught invading state voting systems in 2016 without express permission (allegedly), can we honestly remove them from the list of suspects?

[RedSpawn]

jogs, on 2017-June-22, 07:14, said:

According to Emmit Stussy a person is only lying when he knows he's lying.

Quote

Definition of lie: 1. an intentionally false statement. "Mungo felt a pang of shame at telling Alice a lie" 2. Used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken
impression.

We have to be careful about our lexicon. True, a lie can be construed as a false statement made "intentionally". Therefore, if the speaker unknowingly made a false representation about a fact, you could technically say he didn't lie, but he misspoke.

However, we are dealing with unctuous politicians here. The body politic must refrain from using vocabulary that is contingent on a politician's intent; he may, in fact, be self-serving and undeserving of having his words taken at face value with no further scrutiny.

Also, we should not be in the business of reading a politician's mind because 9 times out of 10, it remains intently focused on 3 things: Money, Power, and Sex (and not necessarily in that order).

[Winstonm]

RedSpawn, on 2017-June-22, 20:45, said:

On its face, this warrants more questions:

• What would Trump need with private data such as driver's license numbers and the last 4 digits of people's social security number to win an election? This could be valuable cross reference information to whomever hacked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for all federal employees' data in late 2015. It will help build a more complete profile of government personnel and contractors. Interesting tidbit, fingerprint scans were also stolen from OPM. http://www.nbcnews.c...victims-n437126
  
  
• So now the Trump campaign is allegedly supposed to have the entire financial backing of the Russian government to alter voter information in (fill in blank) number of states to win an Presidential election?
  
  
• Who are the organizations, domestic and foreign, both private and public, that have the capabilities and manpower to conduct this hack?
  
  
• Who stands to benefit from the hacking? Can this information along with other stolen information be used for political blackmail?

Please note that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first started out by saying that it needed to control the airports to make America safe from terrorists. And now DHS says it needs to designate the information and communications technology at the ballot box as critical infrastructure to make us safe from allegedly unknown hackers.

So who's watching DHS to ensure it doesn't abuse its federal oversight of the IT infrastructure behind the ballot box? If DHS has been caught invading state voting systems in 2016 without express permission (allegedly), can we honestly remove them from the list of suspects?

If you can disrupt the registration, you can indirectly suppress votes with the long lines, chaos, and confusion - odd that the districts targeted by the hackers were strongly Democratic.

[RedSpawn]

Winstonm, on 2017-June-23, 16:07, said:

If you can disrupt the registration, you can indirectly suppress votes with the long lines, chaos, and confusion - odd that the districts targeted by the hackers were strongly Democratic.

True. Very good observation. This indeed makes Russia a dangerous force. How do we know that our own government will remain objective and apolitical and not abuse this system vulnerability to tip the election scales in a politically advantageous way?

We assume that legislatures will remain rational, honest, and reasonable and not gerrymander districts to control election outcomes, but even they give in to temptation and political expediency to secure their power. They violate the public's trust to achieve their own ends.

[cherdano]

ldrews likes to say that so far, Trump has hold up his campaign promises.
Trump promised health insurance coverage for more people. He promised that they would get better coverage, paying lower premiums and lower deductibles. He promised that there would be no cuts to Medicaid.

The Senate healthcare bill does the opposite of all that.

Surely ldrews expects Trump to oppose this bill, right?

[RedSpawn]

cherdano, on 2017-June-24, 01:02, said:

ldrews likes to say that so far, Trump has hold up his campaign promises.
Trump promised health insurance coverage for more people. He promised that they would get better coverage, paying lower premiums and lower deductibles. He promised that there would be no cuts to Medicaid.

The Senate healthcare bill does the opposite of all that.

Surely ldrews expects Trump to oppose this bill, right?

Well, let's review what the snake oil salesman has said,

https://trumpcare.org

His major promise was that he wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare which he labeled a disaster. Exactly what he was going to replace it with has always been open to debate and much speculation.

If we look at his 7 point healthcare platform on his website, it seems that he is trying to accomplish what his platform says. Now, if it becomes law, will his health plan be better than Obamacare? That's a subjective question with relative terms. I don't know the answer.

But you are correct....

https://www.vox.com/...a-medicaid-cuts

President Trump will break his promise not to cut Medicaid...

https://www.washingt...m=.9aa8f26cdfd7

http://www.cnn.com/2...care/index.html

And his plan may not insure or cover more people, but may cover less. . .

https://www.theatlan...ditions/531375/

And there are other concerns about the Senate bill such as potentially inadequate healthcare plans for people with preexisting conditions.

Sometimes carnival acts have no plans or have no realistic plans because they don't quite understand the political calculus of universal healthcare coverage. This is Trump's dilemma. He promised way too much with conveniently vague, noncommittal language which gave the fourth estate wiggle room to create the narrative. President Trump didn't understand how complicated and complex the needs of the various stakeholders are from the patients, to the career politicians, to the insurance providers, to the medical services providers, to the prescription drug companies, and to the various local and state governments and their constituents.

He didn't lie per se; he misspoke because he was woefully ignorant of the existence of all of these COMPETING INTERESTS. He underestimated the sheer number and sophistication of the players involved and how difficult the playing surface was. A typical rookie mistake! 1st rule of negotiation--Know thy opponent(s).

Trump said nobody knew health care would be so complicated when his health care initiative failed in the House. That is projection talk....TRUMP didn't know health care would be so complicated. Trump also didn't know that POLITICS could be so complicated. He didn't know his opponents as well as he thought. He didn't do his political homework and got an unpleasant surprise when he took his first political exam and failed. That's a political reality he must learn from.

[Winstonm]

From Politico magazine:

Quote

Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling, perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.

Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trump’s proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.

And if those policies weren’t enough, conservatives—who, after all, believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the government to its proper role—have plenty of reason to be upset by those actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left ideological divide. He’s voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but outright hostility to it. He’s pulled America back from its role as an international advocate for human rights. He’s attacked the notion of an independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the pressure he felt from Comey’s investigation. For those conservatives who were tempted to embrace a “wait-and-see” approach to Trump, what they’ve seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.

And yet as surprising as this all has been, it’s also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and simply pursues power for the sake of power.

[y66]

I just read that "our planet receives more energy from the sun in one hour than all humankind consumes in an entire year, making solar energy by far the single largest and most exploitable form of renewable energy at our disposal". Does anyone know how Trump plans to exploit this? I don't see any mention of this in his America First Energy Plan. Maybe if we all agree to call him the sun king he will become one.

Quote

Quando paramucho mi amore de felice carazón
Mundo paparazzi mi amore chica ferdi para sol
Questo obrigado tanto mucho que canite carousel

Indeed

[mike777]

y66, on 2017-June-24, 07:52, said:

I just read that "our planet receives more energy from the sun in one hour than all humankind consumes in an entire year, making solar energy by far the single largest and most exploitable form of renewable energy at our disposal". Does anyone know how Trump plans to exploit this? I don't see any mention of this in his America First Energy Plan. Maybe if we all agree to call him the sun king he will become one.


Indeed

This post shows the mind set of so many. You expect a KING or the government to do everything and are disappointed to rely on the marketplace

To see another possible approach see the other forum thread where I commented on solar.

[ldrews]

cherdano, on 2017-June-24, 01:02, said:

ldrews likes to say that so far, Trump has hold up his campaign promises.
Trump promised health insurance coverage for more people. He promised that they would get better coverage, paying lower premiums and lower deductibles. He promised that there would be no cuts to Medicaid.

The Senate healthcare bill does the opposite of all that.

Surely ldrews expects Trump to oppose this bill, right?

Actually ldrews expects Trump to try to get any bill passed so that he can claim "winning" again. That is the nature of politics.

However, it doesn't look like the Republican controlled Congress will be able to pass anything. There is no consensus, even among Republicans. And the Democrats steadfastly refuse to participate/cooperate with the Republicans to pass an improved health care bill. So the current "Obamacare" is likely to continue to be the law of the land, at least for a while. I anticipate that Democrats will reap the benefits of having created and supported an imploding system where premium and deductible increases are rendering the plan unaffordable to many. And as insurance companies continue to bail out, there will be many counties/states where no individual plans are available at all.

The health care situation is a mess and continues to be a mess. And until a consensus emerges it is unlikely to change.

[RedSpawn]

Zelandakh, on 2017-June-22, 08:00, said:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

I love this quote from Through the Looking Glass, Ch. VI. It illustrates the importance of not allowing politicians to control the lexicon. When they control the language, they can misrepresent at will and not be held accountable since they control the filter through which words are defined and interpreted.

Again, politicians are concerned about three things: Money, Power, and Sex (and not necessarily in that order). We can not give them power over our language. Doing so allows them to be masters by controlling the definition of words and directly controlling the filters through which we perceive the world.

Quote

Words cannot change reality, but they can change how people perceive reality. Words create filters through which people view the world around them. https://www.psycholo...ords-have-power

When a Former President answers, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. ... If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement", we have entered Humpty-Dumpty land!

https://www.youtube....h?v=j4XT-l-_3y0

[RedSpawn]

y66, on 2017-June-24, 07:52, said:

I just read that "our planet receives more energy from the sun in one hour than all humankind consumes in an entire year, making solar energy by far the single largest and most exploitable form of renewable energy at our disposal". Does anyone know how Trump plans to exploit this? I don't see any mention of this in his America First Energy Plan. Maybe if we all agree to call him the sun king he will become one.


Indeed

We have to convince the government to subjugate the oil and gas industry for the promise and benefits of solar energy. That is going to be a tough feat since the government's revenue stream, foreign policy, environmental regulation, and most importantly, its monetary hegemony are inextricably linked to oil & gas.

The government will have to find another revenue source if it can't tax solar energy the same way it does gallons of gas.

It gets even more complicated when you factor the petrodollar and monetary hegemony into the picture!

I am all for solar energy but the oil & gas industry is a recalcitrant behemoth.

[mike777]

RedSpawn, on 2017-June-24, 09:55, said:

We have to convince the government to subjugate the oil and gas industry for the promise and benefits of solar energy. That is going to be a tough feat since the government's revenue stream, foreign policy, environmental regulation, and most importantly, its monetary hegemony are inextricable linked to oil & gas.

The government will have to find another revenue source if it can't tax solar energy the same way it does gallons of gas.

It gets even more complicated when you factor the petrodollar and monetary hegemony into the picture!

I am all for solar energy but the oil & gas industry is an recalcitrant behemoth.

Robots, use government robots to subjucate.

[RedSpawn]

mike777, on 2017-June-24, 10:13, said:

Robots, use government robots to subjucate.

With all due respect, the oil and gas industry has had its fun in the sun. America has to be intellectually honest about its American imperialism predicated on oil. Oil, aka black gold, has had a virtual monopoly on the energy markets because it is government sponsored and government subsidized.

The reason I say subjugate is if the government has willfully created barriers to entry for competitors in the energy market so the oil & gas industry can prosper, then it has played favorites. It is not allowing capitalism, technological innovations, and fair competition to determine the leaders and laggards and the winners and losers.

Uncle Sam knows who he wants to win and why; therefore, he needs to subjugate oil and gas and stop the monopolistic or oligopolistic favoritism he showed oil & gas over the last century.

[mike777]

RedSpawn, on 2017-June-24, 10:34, said:

With all due respect, the oil and gas industry has had its fun in the sun. America has to be intellectually honest about its American imperialism predicated on oil. Oil, aka black gold, has had a virtual monopoly on the energy markets because it is government sponsored and government subsidized.

The reason I say subjugate is if the government has willfully created barriers to entry for competitors in the energy market so the oil & gas industry can prosper, then it has played favorites. It is not allowing capitalism, technological innovations, and fair competition to determine the leaders and laggards and the winners and losers.

Uncle Sam knows who he wants to win and why; therefore, he needs to subjugate oil and gas and stop the monopolistic or oligopolistic favoritism he showed oil & gas over the last century.

Robots may be the most efficient way to subjugate whatever your reasons are to subjucate.

[mike777]

RedSpawn, on 2017-June-24, 10:34, said:

With all due respect, the oil and gas industry has had its fun in the sun. America has to be intellectually honest about its American imperialism predicated on oil. Oil, aka black gold, has had a virtual monopoly on the energy markets because it is government sponsored and government subsidized.

The reason I say subjugate is if the government has willfully created barriers to entry for competitors in the energy market so the oil & gas industry can prosper, then it has played favorites. It is not allowing capitalism, technological innovations, and fair competition to determine the leaders and laggards and the winners and losers.

Uncle Sam knows who he wants to win and why; therefore, he needs to subjugate oil and gas and stop the monopolistic or oligopolistic favoritism he showed oil & gas over the last century.

Robots may be the most efficient way to subjugate whatever your reasons are to subjugate. Robots come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and abilities with which you can subjugate.