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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#5721 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-April-20, 07:29

 awm, on 2017-April-20, 04:32, said:

The problems with US schools have been discussed in this (and other) threads and have little to do with teachers unions. They are:

1. Poverty. Kids who need to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or who is taking care of a younger sibling, or how they are getting to and from school safely are going to have a tougher time learning than more affluent kids. Kids whose parents have time to help them with homework will do better than kids with parents who are hustling 12-hour work days to make ends meet. US has much higher percentage of children in poverty than other comparably affluent countries. While we spend relatively a lot on schools, we spend very little on social safety net.


To this it is important to add "future potential". Even with education, the chance of landing a good-paying job is not good. I read a book, "Gang Leader for a Day", by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, that helped explain the issue of future work prospects verses illegal wealth accumulation via gangs for a group of Chicago inner-city youth living in the projects.

The takeaway is that it is impossible to sell "The American Dream" to those who have been forced to abandon imagination and accept an ugly reality all their lives.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#5722 User is offline   jogs 

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Posted 2017-April-20, 07:45

 awm, on 2017-April-20, 04:32, said:

The problems with US schools have been discussed in this (and other) threads and have little to do with teachers unions. They are:

1. Poverty. Kids who need to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or who is taking care of a younger sibling, or how they are getting to and from school safely are going to have a tougher time learning than more affluent kids. Kids whose parents have time to help them with homework will do better than kids with parents who are hustling 12-hour work days to make ends meet. US has much higher percentage of children in poverty than other comparably affluent countries. While we spend relatively a lot on schools, we spend very little on social safety net.


Give me a break. You live in San Jose. Many Asian families are extremely poor and the parents can't speak English. Yet Asians do well in school.

The problem the left will not admit is unmarried teen high school drop-outs don't make good parents.
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#5723 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-April-20, 08:57

Here is Jogs hero in action:
emphasis added:

Quote

It is now clear that the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#5724 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2017-April-20, 10:19

 Winstonm, on 2017-April-20, 08:57, said:

Here is Jogs hero in action:
emphasis added:

THE CONTINUING FALLOUT FROM TRUMP AND NUNES’S FAKE SCANDAL By Ryan Lizza
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#5725 User is online   mikeh 

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Posted 2017-April-20, 11:10

 jogs, on 2017-April-20, 07:45, said:

Give me a break. You live in San Jose. Many Asian families are extremely poor and the parents can't speak English. Yet Asians do well in school.

The problem the left will not admit is unmarried teen high school drop-outs don't make good parents.

Have you ever taken a look at the correlation between unmarried teen high school dropouts and political governance? The 10 states with the highest rate of teenage pregnancies are almost all Red states, while the 10 with the lowest are almost all Blue states.

You do keep trying to convince us with your superficial right wing talking points, but the problem for you is that many of us understand that reality is a little more nuanced than O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Beck et al appear to think.

As for your assertion: show me who, on the 'left', says that unmarried teen mothers make good parents? Show me someone advocating for unmarried teenage girls to become parents. You know who does? Right wing 'pro-life' people. Sure, they all say that the girl should not get pregnant, but they all also say that sex education is bad, contraception is bad, and abortion is bad....and then act all horrified that girls get pregnant.

You really ought to think before pressing send on some of your posts...take a little time to think about what you are writing and ask....is this correct? Virtually every factoid or proposition you post is easily falsifiable. Don't you ever get tired of learning that reality isn't the way you think it is? My guess: no, because you aren't interested in facts, only in repeating alt-right nonsense. Prove me wrong.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#5726 User is offline   jogs 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 08:15

 mikeh, on 2017-April-20, 11:10, said:

Have you ever taken a look at the correlation between unmarried teen high school dropouts and political governance? The 10 states with the highest rate of teenage pregnancies are almost all Red states, while the 10 with the lowest are almost all Blue states.


You guys on the just make up facts. Your source better not be from a left wing group.

You're not even American.
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#5727 User is online   mikeh 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 08:50

 jogs, on 2017-April-21, 08:15, said:

You guys on the just make up facts. Your source better not be from a left wing group.

You're not even American.


Why do you not check facts?

To a rational person, facts inform opinion. When one holds a view on something, one should welcome learning facts that contradict that view. It means that one has learned something. Whether that merely modifies one's views or completely changes them would depend on a host of factors, but the central point is that an intelligent person should prefer that his or her opinions be based on reality.

Btw, I see myself primarily as a person, not a Canadian. Tribal loyalties are part of the same sort of power structure as are religions. Tribal loyalties foster 'othering' of people. Tribal loyalties allow people to act in horrendous ways towards others because they are seen as somewhat less human than fellow tribal members. I'm not some Vulcan wannabe: I'm not impervious to many of these influences, but I try to be aware of them as best I can.

As a person with eclectic interests, I read a great deal on many subjects. I like to learn things. This means that from time to time my opinions change. I see that as a good thing. How about you? Would you rather remain ignorant but secure in your views or prefer to find out whether your views accord with or reflect reality?

As for commenting on US politics, the reality of being Canadian means that many US political factors have significant impact on my life. Trudeau (the father, not the current PM) once described Canada's relationship to the US as being akin to a mouse sleeping next to an elephant. The mouse needs to be acutely aware of the elephant's movement.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#5728 User is offline   Cyberyeti 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 09:26

 jogs, on 2017-April-21, 08:15, said:

You guys on the just make up facts. Your source better not be from a left wing group.

You're not even American.


Or you could do your own research, a few minutes on the net (figures not perfect due to the date mismatch)

sources https://en.wikipedia...e_United_States https://en.wikipedia...te_legislatures

The top 13 if you ignore DC have 8 republican legislatures, one coalition and 4 democrat
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#5729 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 09:32

 jogs, on 2017-April-21, 08:15, said:

You guys on the just make up facts. Your source better not be from a left wing group.

I thought that everyone knew that the red states have a much greater problem with teen pregnancies than the blue states: National Vital Statistics Reports

Table B shows the number of births per thousand for girls between 15 and 19 years of age, by state. You can look at the first column for the latest results (2015). As you can see for yourself, girls in states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are 4 times as likely to have babies as are girls in Massachusetts.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#5730 User is online   kenberg 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 14:42

As to statistics: I am reading a mystery, Munster's Case, by Hakan Nesser. They are investigating the murder of a man in his seventies and the conversation between two detectives goes something like this:

First detective: Perhaps we should not exclude the possibility that she [his wife] did it. Sixty percent of all men are murdered by their wives.
Second detective: Thank God I am not married.
First detective: You know what I mean.

Like all good jokes, it makes a point. The table B that is referred to speaks of births to women age 15-19 without regard to whether they are married. In more rural/red states it may well be that there are more 18 year old brides than in more urbanized areas.

At any rate, I am skeptical that getting pregnant at 17 made a woman into a Trump voter when she turned 18. Perhaps not thinking choices through to their consequences played a role in both events. Mothers do still explain to their daughters that they should not believe everything that a man tells them, no?
Ken
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#5731 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 15:16

Let's just stop for a second, and take note of what it means to use the following sentence, apparently as a convincing argument that someone is wrong. No further comment necessary.

 jogs, on 2017-April-21, 08:15, said:

You're not even American.

The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
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#5732 User is offline   ldrews 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 18:04

 cherdano, on 2017-April-21, 15:16, said:

Let's just stop for a second, and take note of what it means to use the following sentence, apparently as a convincing argument that someone is wrong. No further comment necessary.


I would not interpret that as the person being wrong but rather the person being irrelevant. There is a difference.
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#5733 User is online   mikeh 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 19:55

 ldrews, on 2017-April-21, 18:04, said:

I would not interpret that as the person being wrong but rather the person being irrelevant. There is a difference.

And there I thought that a discussion was about the facts. lol.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#5734 User is offline   ldrews 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 20:45

 mikeh, on 2017-April-21, 19:55, said:

And there I thought that a discussion was about the facts. lol.


You are saying that the phrase "You're not even American" is about facts?
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#5735 User is online   mikeh 

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Posted 2017-April-21, 21:20

 ldrews, on 2017-April-21, 20:45, said:

You are saying that the phrase "You're not even American" is about facts?

'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#5736 User is offline   alok c 

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Posted 2017-April-22, 00:26

 cherdano, on 2017-April-21, 15:16, said:

Let's just stop for a second, and take note of what it means to use the following sentence, apparently as a convincing argument that someone is wrong. No further comment necessary.

Tribalism & faux superiority complex at it's best.Then no one should comment about anything good,bad or ugly happening in any other country apart from his own as none has the right to criticize others but gets itchy when some pertinent points/arguments are raised regarding his.
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#5737 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2017-April-22, 06:46

 kenberg, on 2017-April-21, 14:42, said:

The table B that is referred to speaks of births to women age 15-19 without regard to whether they are married. In more rural/red states it may well be that there are more 18 year old brides than in more urbanized areas.

Or one could note from the same paper that, of the 22.3 live births per thousand to girls in the US aged 15-19, only 2.1 of those live births were to girls who were married. Even if all of the married pregnant teenagers were from red states (and they were not), it would not overcome the red state - blue state disparity.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#5738 User is online   kenberg 

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Posted 2017-April-22, 07:07

I'm not French, or "not even French" if someone wants phrase it that way. but I hope that doesn't preclude me from expressing an opinion on French elections or other French matters.

I suppose the situation is not exactly analogous. My knowledge of French society is meager. I would say très peu except even that might be mangling the language. The US is different. As near as I can see the French pay little attention to what happens in Brazil, and Brazilians pay little attention to what happens in France, but everyone has an opinion about the US. I am speaking here of the monsieur de rue of course, not the diplomats. Diplomats are expected to have opinions about penguin society in Antarctica. Anyway, I wish the French the best tomorrow.

It's natural that different countries have different approaches. It's part of why we travel, is it not? Many years ago we were walking from the center of Granada up toward the Alhambra. A Gypsy woman approached some guys a few paces ahead of us. They dismissed her with "Senora, somos de Granada". So she came toward us and my daughter, without missing a beat, said "Senora, somos de Granada". It's just a matter of learning the local customs.

Anyway, we Americans are always glad to hear advice. We don't actually act on any of it of course, but we are glad to hear it.







Ken
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#5739 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-April-22, 10:14

 cherdano, on 2017-April-21, 15:16, said:

Let's just stop for a second, and take note of what it means to use the following sentence, apparently as a convincing argument that someone is wrong. No further comment necessary.

Quote

jogs, on 2017-April-21, 10:15, said:
You're not even American.

If we look at this same type argument in a historical perspective, we find things like this: you have no right to decide the fate of our slaves because you're not from Tennessee or you have no right to tell our schools who to allow in because you're not from Alabama or you have no right to live because you aren't "one of us"...
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#5740 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2017-April-22, 11:56

From The Real Trump Agenda: Helping Big Business by John Cassidy:

Quote

What with U.S. aircraft carriers sailing in the wrong direction, Attorney General Jeff Sessions describing Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific,” and Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock larking around in the Oval Office, it’s been a pretty typical week for the Trump Administration: jaw-dropping, mind-addling, hard to keep up with. With all the chaos and dysfunction at the top, the Administration’s many pro-corporate regulatory initiatives are being somewhat overlooked by both the media and the public at large. This is wrong: these are decisions and actions that will have harmful consequences, and Trump’s own supporters will be among those hurt.

Consider the Environmental Protection Agency, where Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma Attorney General who has long served as a protector of the oil and gas industry, is busy hiring fellow-climate-change skeptics to help him carry out Trump’s edict to dismantle the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan. The end result seems certain to be increased carbon emissions.

Pruitt’s aides are also drawing up plans to lay off many of the people at the agency who actually believe in environmental protection. In the budget proposal he released earlier this year, Trump called for the E.P.A.’s funding to be cut by almost a third. According to the Washington Post, Pruitt’s staff has drawn up a detailed plan that would eliminate a quarter of the agency’s workforce and fifty-six of its programs, including ones designed to clean up the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, and Puget Sound.

Pruitt is a lightning rod, so the E.P.A. gets a fair amount of attention from news outlets, even, occasionally, from television news programs. This isn’t the case for other agencies whose missions have also tilted sharply right since January, such as the Federal Communications Commission. In 2013, when Barack Obama appointed Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the cable industry, to chair the F.C.C., many commentators, myself included, expressed concern. Wheeler, however, turned out to be a forceful regulator. He rejected the cable industry’s calls to end net neutrality—the principle that Internet-service providers should treat all content providers equally—and supported applying the “common carrier” telephone law to I.S.P.s, rather than continuing to treat them under the less onerous set of rules that apply to “information services.”

Wheeler resigned in January. To replace him, Trump promoted Ajit Pai, another Obama appointee to the F.C.C., but one whom Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, had recommended. Under Pai’s leadership, the F.C.C. has already taken numerous steps to roll back regulation and preserve or enhance the power of monopolistic providers like A.T. & T., Verizon (where Pai once worked), and Comcast. On Thursday, the agency moved to eliminate price caps on broadband services marketed to heavy users of data, such as businesses, hospitals, and schools. This change followed decisions to end a program designed to help poor people obtain broadband access, and to reverse an initiative that would have allowed cable customers to buy their own set-top boxes. (At the moment, cable providers force people to rent their boxes at high prices.)

Explaining the decision to deregulate broadband data services, Pai parroted the standard conservative line that “price regulation threatens competition and investment.” The reality is that, in most areas, cable companies face little or no competition. The F.C.C.’s own research shows that close to three-quarters of business customers have a single provider of business data services, and ninety-seven per cent have two or fewer providers. In monopolistic markets like this, the only way to prevent incumbents from gouging their customers is to regulate their behavior.

The inevitable result of Thursday’s ruling will be higher prices for Internet users. As Phillip Berenbroick, a senior policy counsel at the digital-rights group Public Knowledge, pointed out in a statement, “consumers, and American families and businesses will pay dearly for the green light the FCC has given to the unfettered exercise of market power by dominant telecommunications providers.”

Although Pai hasn’t yet targeted the F.C.C.’s broader endorsement of net neutrality, this looks like only a matter of time. This week, he announced that he’s been soliciting views from executives at Internet companies, such as Facebook and Intel, which are vehemently opposed to any change in the rules. On Thursday, the Times reported that Pai “is expected to introduce a plan that would weaken aspects of the net neutrality rules as soon as this month.” When he does, he will almost certainly receive strong support from the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Underlying all of these developments is a message from the Trump Administration to corporate America: the rules of the game are changing. The message has been heard, and the players are reacting to it accordingly. Dow Chemical, for example, is pressing the Administration to ignore scientific findings that some of its pesticides are harmful to endangered species. In letters addressed to the heads of three federal agencies, including the E.P.A., company lawyers “asked them ‘to set aside’ the results of government studies the companies contend are fundamentally flawed,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday.

Not exactly big news in the WC I know.
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