Cont: Breaking: Mueller Grand Jury charges filed, arrests as soon as Monday pt 2

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acbytesla said:
I understand being pessimistic right now. But all is not lost yet. The fact is that religion is eroding with every generation even in the United States. Knowledge will win out....I hope.
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Theistic religion is a symptom of human foolishness, not a cause. There's no shortage of non-theistic ideologies troubling the world.
 
theprestige said:
Theistic religion is a symptom of human foolishness, not a cause. There's no shortage of non-theistic ideologies troubling the world.
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The world was far less troubled during the Cold War than it has been since that fizzled out.

Southern Baptists in the US, Islamists all over, fundamentalist Judaism in Israel, the BJP in India, Putin kissing the Russian Orthodox ring, all that troubles me. What troubles you : China? Liberals?
 
theprestige said:
Theistic religion is a symptom of human foolishness, not a cause. There's no shortage of non-theistic ideologies troubling the world.
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No question. That said, much of Trump's support come from Evangelicals. Religion scares the hell out of me because it glorifies wilfull ignorance over reason, knowledge and science.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
This is from today on the Amazon page:But you have to understand how they calculate those numbers. It's based on sales today or a rolling week, something short like that. Any book people buy right off the bat like this kind of crap will be a best seller for a couple days, then it will drop off the map.
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While still being referenced as "the best-selling book" in the next book of the chain.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
How was the weather on inaugeration day?
https://globalnews.ca/news/4362603/jackson-proskow-donald-trump-supporters/
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Exactly. This from your link:

Trump learned the power of misinformation long before taking office, when he started spreading the lie that former president Barack Obama was secretly a Kenyan-born Muslim. People ate it up then, as Trump popularized the myth.

Since then, the president has manufactured a crisis of media credibility as a way to inoculate himself and his administration from scandal.

All he has to do is brand the media as “the enemy of the people,” and “fake news,” whenever a story he doesn’t like appears, and his supporters will believe that they can’t believe anything but his word.

It sounds ridiculous, but it has worked. Seventy-one percent of Republicans now think that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is a “witch hunt,” and just 16 per cent consider it a legitimate investigation, all because the president has said so.
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Like I said, you can't fix stupid.
 
CapelDodger said:
In my darker moods I feel like that about the entire Enlightenment.

When I was growing up in the 60's and 70's it was taken as a given that secularism and the scientific method had triumphed over fundamentalist religion and there could be no going back (outside a post-apocalyptic future, as in A Canticle for Leibowitz). The recrudescence of fundamentalist religion in politics from about 1980 took me completely by surprise.

I'm not disappointed by the absence of jetpacks and a flying car in every garage, but I'm deeply disappointed by that.
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Amen to that!
 
At the rally tonight in PA, Trump once again said told his adoring followers that the Russia investigation was a hoax; not the collusion investigation, but the Russia investigation. He also falsely claimed that Russia was very unhappy that he had won despite Putin saying clearly in Helsinki that he wanted Trump to win. And the idiots behind him cheered it as if what he was saying was true and not blatant lies. Like I said, you can't fix stupid.

He also said to throw out a protester.
 
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Tero said:
Manafort and Gates:
I've seen this on a TV show. Two guys covered in blood kill third guy. In separate rooms in interrogation they say they just helped cover up and the other guy did all the killing.
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They're likely to tell the truth, assuming Manafort flips..

The first thing is that I've seen it said several times that if the FBI ask you a question then they already know the answer. They're trying to gain leverage by getting you to lie to them, which is a crime. Or, to put it another way, there is no way that the FBI will be relying just on testimony to make its case. There will be corroborating evidence.

Page and Manafort (if he flips) will be given immunity for crimes and lenient prosecution for others. That goes away if they lie and, in doing so, contradict what the FBI has evidence for. Then they not only get the book thrown at them, but they are also prosecuted for additional crimes.

In other words - once you've taken a deal you have nothing whatsoever to lose by telling the truth and a great deal to lose by lying. If they are at all smart and have even vaguely competent counsel (I know, not necessarily true), then they'll tell the truth, even if under normal circumstances it would be inculpatory.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
The first thing is that I've seen it said several times that if the FBI ask you a question then they already know the answer. They're trying to gain leverage by getting you to lie to them, which is a crime. Or, to put it another way, there is no way that the FBI will be relying just on testimony to make its case. There will be corroborating evidence.
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As a minor nitpick, given some of the propaganda from the right about Flynn, this is not always true. There are different reasons for interviews to be done, after all.
 
CapelDodger said:
In my darker moods I feel like that about the entire Enlightenment.

When I was growing up in the 60's and 70's it was taken as a given that secularism and the scientific method had triumphed over fundamentalist religion and there could be no going back (outside a post-apocalyptic future, as in A Canticle for Leibowitz). The recrudescence of fundamentalist religion in politics from about 1980 took me completely by surprise.

I'm not disappointed by the absence of jetpacks and a flying car in every garage, but I'm deeply disappointed by that.
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It’s the lack of holidays on the moon that most upset me.
 
Aridas said:
As a minor nitpick, given some of the propaganda from the right about Flynn, this is not always true. There are different reasons for interviews to be done, after all.
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Yeah, I think it would be more accurate to say that if the FBI asks you a question, they might already know the answer, so lying is risky business. Given Flynn's experience, he surely knew that risk when he lied about talking to Russians.
 
CapelDodger said:
I never took to Heinlein so I wouldn't have noticed. Frank Herbert was a different matter, but that was far future fantasy, not something I'd have to watch and live with.
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I don't know, the quote about "when politics and religion ride in the same cart" seems pretty apt.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
They're likely to tell the truth, assuming Manafort flips..

The first thing is that I've seen it said several times that if the FBI ask you a question then they already know the answer. They're trying to gain leverage by getting you to lie to them, which is a crime. Or, to put it another way, there is no way that the FBI will be relying just on testimony to make its case. There will be corroborating evidence.
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I believe that if someone flips, the FBI will push them for corroborating evidence of whatever they say. In the Manafort trial, anything that Gates says in court could simply be dismissed at Gates' word against Manafort's, but if Gates could point them to offshore bank accounts, or damning emails, etc, that would be a whole 'nother thing. And that's what they'd want.



Many (many!) years ago, a friend of mine was thinking about working with a mid-level drug dealer (importer), and my friend insisted that the importer was "too smart to get caught." He probably was. Some of his associates, however, were not. One was caught, flipped, and told the Feds about some upcoming exchange. The Feds took video of the whole transaction and then arrested the importer while he was carrying a suitcase of drugs. And when the Feds do things like that, the informant's credibility is both established and superfluous. AFAIK, the informant never even appeared in court.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
The new test for access to the press pool will be to answer the question "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Only FOX News will qualify for it.
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OTOH if FOX were to ask President Trump that question they would risk being excluded from the pool for stretching his math ability and/or suggesting he had concussion.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
The new test for access to the press pool will be to answer the question "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Only FOX News will qualify for it.
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CNN: "There are four lights!"

Trump: "Fake news! Five lights! Get them out of here"
 
The_Animus said:
CNN: "There are four lights!"

Fox Trump: "Fake news! Five lights!"

Trump: "At least six or seven lights. Under Obama, there were only three lights until he broke one, do you believe that? We had only two lights under Obama, and Hillary was trying to give one of those to the Russians. But we have eight lights now, and by that I mean at least eight, maybe nine, maybe ten and people are saying that we'll probably be up to fifteen lights soon."
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ftfy :)

ETA: now I have this vision of Trump claiming that the US was down to only 37 states under Obama, but that we're up to at least 60 now.
 
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