A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Next Disaster Is Just a Few Days Away

Millions of unemployed Americans face imminent catastrophe.

Two months have gone by since the House passed a relief measure, The Heroes Act, that would, among other things, extend enhanced unemployment benefits through the rest of the year. www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6800 But neither Senate Republicans nor the White House has shown any sense of urgency about the looming crisis. Why?

Part of the answer is that Trump and his officials are still talking about a rapid, V-shape recovery that will bring us quickly back to full employment, making special aid to the unemployed unnecessary; they’re apparently oblivious to what everyone else sees — an economy that is stumbling again as the coronavirus surges back.

Delusions about the state of the economic recovery, in turn, allow conservatives to indulge in one of their favorite ideas — that helping the unemployed in a depressed economy hurts job creation, by discouraging people from taking jobs, but those jobs temporarily don’t exist because the pandemic is keeping customers at home, not out shopping and dining and taking airplane trips.

Worrying about employment incentives in the midst of a pandemic seems to be at the core of White House “thinking” about economic policy right now.

Republicans don’t seem to realize that they, not the Democrats, will be blamed if millions are plunged into penury because unemployment relief is delayed; to the extent that they’re willing to act at all, they still imagine that they can extract concessions like a blanket exemption of businesses from pandemic liability.

Maybe the prospect of catastrophe will concentrate Republican minds, but it seems more likely that we’re heading for weeks if not months of extreme financial distress for millions of unemployed Americans, distress that will hobble the economy as a whole. This disaster didn’t need to happen; but you can say the same thing about most of what has gone wrong lately.

www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/coronavirus-economy-unemployment.ht
ml

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 17, 2020 10:30 AM

Funny that congress always seems to be on spring break at times like these...

They're writing something up. They don't go back to work until the 20th, and that means they've got a little over a week to get something passed before payments for the week ending the 25th go out.

The systems are largely in place so it shouldn't be 2 to 3 months to get everything up and running for everyone. That being said, there are always bugs, and there are always hiccups.

My predictions:

1. There will be a "back to work" incentive added this time that will give several hundred dollars per week above your paycheck at your new job that would last at least a month, but likely as long as any FPUC extension.

2. They're going to cap the FPUC for unemployed people to 100% of their pay when they got laid off.

3. Although Number 2 sounds like that would be hard to do, it really isn't. Your monetary determination varies, state by state, but it ends up being a percentage of your average weekly pay for your base period. I believe in Illinois and Indiana for instance, your weekly unemployment payouts are 47% of what your average weekly pay was.

All that would need to be done in those states is an additional 53% FPUC payout per week to make that whole.

That being said, these are only 2 examples out of 50. There is probably a pretty wide variety in how different states handled this. But I can't imagine a scenario where the data isn't already there and easily plugged into a process that would make this 100%.

4. There will be bugs, and as a result, some states will be paying out the additional federal funds immediately while others will see their unemployed only getting their regular state level UI for a month or more until the system is implemented, at which time they will get a retroactive payment for the weeks of federal funds missed.

4. Additional FPUC benefits will be extended to December.

I seriously doubt that the extra full $600 is going to continue, but 100% of previous pay is pretty likely.

Eventually, somebody is going to have to revisit this once again late in the year if the Mask Karens get their way and we're just shutting down everything forever.

52 weeks of unemployment isn't going to be enough if we're still talking about this next spring.

I have a feeling that one way or another come November 4th it's going to disappear from the news cycle though.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 18, 2020 7:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Trump’s Efforts to Distort the Census Have Started Back Up

At the end of last month, the White House and the Commerce Department placed two new political appointees at the Census Bureau, renewing fears that the Trump administration was again seeking to interfere with the census, a sprawling operation whose results will shape the distribution of political power and federal funds for the next decade. One of the roles went to Adam Korzeniewski, a Marine Corps veteran who consulted for the unsuccessful congressional campaign of Joseph Saladino, a controversial YouTube prankster who once wore a swastika to a Trump rally and claimed in one of his videos that “the Black community is very violent towards Trump and his supporters.” The other position went to Nathaniel T. Cogley, a radio commentator and assistant professor at Tarleton State University in Texas, who will be the deputy director for policy—the highest post a political appointee has held at the bureau for decades (besides the director, who is also a political appointee).

Neither Cogley’s nor Korzeniewski’s job descriptions have been made public—the roles did not even exist prior to the announcement—and neither man has sustained experience with census operations. Adding political appointees in the middle of the count is virtually unprecedented, not to mention doing so right at the start of what is sure to be one of the most difficult in-person counting operations in the bureau’s history. The American Statistical Association decried the news as creating “the perception—if not reality—of improper political influence.” The inspector general has asked the bureau to provide additional information about the positions, and Democratic lawmakers recently accused the Trump administration of failing to explain why political appointees are “running what should be an ideologically neutral count of the people in our country.”

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/donald-trump-census-citize
nship-question-executive-order-scotus.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 18, 2020 8:02 AM

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 19, 2020 6:28 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Throw the Bums Out

America is in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?

Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the Covid-19 mountain, a three-dimensional foam mound representing the pandemic’s toll on his state. He had used the “mountain” metaphor before and had apparently decided to make it tangible. Referring to the chart of daily new infections statewide, he said that New Yorkers had climbed the “mountain.” Now, with that number declining to seemingly manageable levels, he turned the chart into a monument to the state’s collective achievement.

In a functional democracy with any standard of democratic accountability — a country where elected officials expect to be held responsible for outcomes they could have controlled or influenced — a governor would only have unveiled such a bloody monument if he needed an explanation for his immediate resignation. Cuomo, instead, had the mountain recast as a commemorative poster, which he revealed at a press conference on Monday afternoon.

The “mountain” is a triumphalist materialization of an overwhelming pile of bodies. It is a manifestation of a horrific and avoidable failure. New Yorkers did not set out to climb the mountain; they were led to its peak by their government.

That very much includes our federal government, which clearly signaled by early March that it was neither willing nor able to do what was necessary to contain the pandemic nationwide. Months into the crisis, we still face inexplicable and inexcusable testing delays, evidence that the federal government never addressed its earliest and most catastrophic failure. Here in New York, where Cuomo would have us believe that we have made it to the other side of the mountain, where tests are ostensibly available to anyone who wants one, I would face, according to one of the city’s main swab test sources, a seven-day wait for results, severely limiting the test’s effectiveness as a way of tracking the spread of the virus.

The United States has the highest Covid-19 death toll in the world, and it is rapidly adding a staggering number of new cases every day. These are conditions that would lead to widespread resignations of public health officials in a functionally democratic country. Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown resigned less than a month after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. So far, most of the people who’ve been forced out of public health jobs since the pandemic began have been those advocating for more forceful and effective government action.

While our federal government’s catastrophic and ongoing failure to prepare for or mitigate the pandemic rightfully earns most of the blame for the explosion of cases, an exclusive focus on the federal response obscures the total extent of our national failure. Our federalist system may deny governors all the resources the federal government can marshal, but it still gives them plenty of power. Most American states have resources small nations can only dream of, and most governors have as much power as the heads of any number of foreign governments. If it was clear by March that the federal government would simply not be containing Covid-19 (and I certainly think it was clear), it was the responsibility of governors like Cuomo to try to contain it themselves.

Western media sometimes claims the successful containment of the virus in Asian countries like South Korea is due to their populace’s high trust in government, their conformity, and their willingness to submit to authority. In reality, it has only been three years since South Koreans took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands to overthrow their government for corruption. That President, Park Geun-hye, is jailed for 25 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Geun-hye#Arrest_and_detention

Is America’s only recourse to negligence and misfeasance truly to wait for a chance to vote the bums out? Unless and until the people in charge in the U.S. are scared of actually being held responsible for the outcomes of their actions and inaction, they’re going to keep dragging us up mountains and leaving us to die at the peaks.

More at https://newrepublic.com/article/158489/andrew-cuomo-coronavirus-mounta
in-poster-governors-should-resign

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 19, 2020 8:04 AM

Yes. Throw the bums out.

All the Democrat leaders of Democrat shitholes that are burning to the ground all need to be removed from office and put in prison.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 19, 2020 11:09 AM

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 8:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump tweeted yesterday:

So we catch Obama & Biden, not to even mention the rest of their crew, SPYING on my campaign, AND NOTHING HAPPENS? I hope not! If it were the other way around, 50 years for treason. NEVER FORGET!!!!

12:14 PM • Jul 19, 2020 • Twitter for iPhone

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1284899438591451137

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump tweeted in 2013:

Leadership: Whatever happens, you're responsible. If it doesn't happen, you're responsible.

1:01 PM • Nov 8, 2013 • Twitter Web Client

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/398887965302091776

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 11:03 AM

Wow.

Which genius at Vox trolled 7 years of Trumps tweets to find another post that used the word happens?

That sounds like an easy job. One that robots will be doing soon.

Better learn to code.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 11:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Wow.

Which genius at Vox trolled 7 years of Trumps tweets to find another post that used the word happens?

That sounds like an easy job. One that robots will be doing soon.

Better learn to code.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Trump is screaming about treason and 50 year jail sentences. He could do more than tweet by signing an executive order to his attorney general, worded approximately, "I have reason to believe President Obama and Vice-President Biden may have committed treason. I request they be investigated. If sufficient evidence is found, they be put on trial, and if found guilty, be sentenced." It is Trump's responsibility to make it happen. But he is NOT a guy who takes responsible action, is he?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 11:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Biden strategy

After the 2016 election, panicked, wounded Democrats settled on a diagnosis. Trump, for all his mania, bigotry, and chaos, had given angry Americans something to vote for. To stop him, Democrats would need to match force with counter-force, polarization with mobilization. They would need to show as much anger, as much populism, as much wrecking ball energy as he did.

Biden is running — and, for now, winning — by defying that diagnosis. He is executing a careful, quiet campaign focused less on thrilling his partisans than denying Trump the boogeyman he needs to reenergize his base. It’s a campaign that frustrates liberal activists and pundits because it repeatedly, routinely denies them the excitement and collisions that structure modern politics. It’s also, for that reason, a campaign that is frustrating Trump and Fox News, which is why they keep trying to run against Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar instead.

www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/20/21326267/biden-trump-2020-wi
nning-polls-polarization-election

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 11:44 AM

Biden is being quiet because his handlers put a muzzle on him. Biden's worst enemy is the lack of filter between his demented brain and his mouth.

Those polls are bullshit, just like they were in 2016.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 12:02 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

The problem with the polls in 2016 was that they were over-sampled, which was freely discussed at the time. I'm not seeing any caveats about the polls this time around.

And the problem with the betting odds is that people are betting based on the polls they're reading, so they're not an independent measure. If anything, betting odds are a trailing measure from the polls.

The polls could be accurate as they stand today. But then there's Biden. People don't call him the 'gaffe master' for nothing. A lot can happen between now and the election.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 12:15 PM

20,000 lies and counting.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 12:31 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Obama didn't dismantle secret surveillance, he extra-judicially drone-killed at least one American citizen, no one went to jail for the massive fraud of the economic collapse, wages remained stagnant, as many people went bankrupt due to medical bills under Obamacare as before it while deaths from chronic disease went up, and Ukraine, Syria, and Libya were Obama-promoted.

Most importantly, relations with Russia and any ability to negotiate over nukes went down and CO2 emission kept going up.

And Biden is more of the same, but now! NOW!! NOW!!! with even more baggage and fewer brains than ever!

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 12:36 PM

Brilliant post REVERFAN. Funny how kikii jumps right in to deflect away from your post instead of sharing any disagreement of it; as always.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 20, 2020 1:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:

All examples of Democrat obstruction and meddling.

Thanks for summing that up.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, July 23, 2020 6:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Will the Republican Party Implode?

Some Republican governors have begun connecting directly with the vice president in order to circumvent President Trump.

Is the long-predicted Republican crack-up finally here? Pollsters and social scientists have been predicting an “emerging Democratic majority” for more than two decades.

Their main rationale was demographic. Groups that tended to vote for Democrats were expanding—college-educated, Hispanic, African American, older voters—while the core Republican base was contracting.

We published the first such piece, by Paul Starr, in 1997 (!), and two frequent Prospect contributors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, wrote a book by that title in 2002. As Starr pointed out, Bill Clinton, as an emblem of the new moderate South, made inroads in the 1996 election in several Southern states.

The most recent and comprehensive account, by our friend Stan Greenberg in his new book RIP GOP, identifies even more powerful demographic and ideological trends. Young people and single women are more progressive and intensely Democratic than ever. Old folks are coming back to the Dems, given the Trump-driven calamities in nursing homes. Racial justice is a majority cause once again.

What took so long for the emerging Democratic majority to emerge? One reason was electoral theft—the 2000 election. There were also major elements of theft in the form of voter suppression in 2016. And clearly, theft will be the main obstacle to a big Democratic win in 2020.

A second factor was the Republican embrace of the racist South. The sort of racial moderates among Southern governors represented by Jimmy Carter (Georgia), Bill Clinton (Arkansas), and Ray Mabus (Mississippi) have been eclipsed by Republican versions of George Wallace.

A third factor was the desertion of two core parts of the traditional Democratic base—older voters who were loyal to Democrats based on Social Security, Medicare, and memories of FDR; and white working-class voters who once voted wall-to-wall Democratic in the North, but saw neoliberal Democrats doing a lot for bankers and not much for them.

More at https://prospect.org/politics/will-the-republican-party-implode/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, July 23, 2020 11:28 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Will the Republican Party Implode?

No.

Funny you're asking that when 24/7 news coverage shows the Democratic party do it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 5:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea.

Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. The new work, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first — the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.

Much more at www.scientificamerican.com/article/living-a-lie-we-deceive-ourselves-t
o-better-deceive-others/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 6:23 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Ahem!

Haven't people known about the first part for a long time and didn't they call it confirmation bias a long time ago?

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 6:47 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Ahem!

Haven't people known about the first part for a long time and didn't they call it confirmation bias a long time ago?

You didn't read the article, did you? I'll quote three paragraphs:

In one experiment Trivers and his team asked 306 online participants to write a persuasive speech about a fictional man named Mark. They were told they would receive a bonus depending on how effective it was. Some were told to present Mark as likable, others were instructed to depict him as unlikable, the remaining subjects were directed to convey whatever impression they formed. To gather information about Mark, the participants watched a series of short videos, which they could stop observing at any intermission. For some viewers, most of the early videos presented Mark in a good light (recycling, returning a wallet), and they grew gradually darker (catcalling, punching a friend). For others, the videos went from dark to light.

When incentivized to present Mark as likable, people who watched the likable videos first stopped watching sooner than those who saw unlikable videos first. The former did not wait for a complete picture as long as they got the information they needed to convince themselves, and others, of Mark’s goodness. In turn, their own opinions about Mark were more positive, which led their essays about his good nature to be more convincing, as rated by other participants. (A complementary process occurred for those paid to present Mark as bad.) “What’s so interesting is that we seem to intuitively understand that if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we’ll be more effective at getting others to believe it,” says William von Hippel, a psychologist at The University of Queensland, who co-authored the study. “So we process information in a biased fashion, we convince ourselves, and we convince others. The beauty is, those are the steps Trivers outlined—and they all lined up in one study.”

In real life you are not being paid to talk about Mark but you may be selling a used car or debating a tax policy or arguing for a promotion—cases in which you benefit not from gaining and presenting an accurate picture of reality but from convincing someone of a particular point of view.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 6:57 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

No - I read it.

People have all sorts of reasons to want to be right. Wanting to be right to sell something to somebody is only one reason out of many. Once you want to be right for whatever reason, you'll do a lot to convince yourself that you are.

It all seems like part of the same package to me.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 7:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
No - I read it.

People have all sorts of reasons to want to be right. Wanting to be right to sell something to somebody is only one reason out of many. Once you want to be right for whatever reason, you'll do a lot to convince yourself that you are.

It all seems like part of the same package to me.

You could change the words "want to be right" to "deceive and mislead". Then you'd be more than halfway to a theory about why American politics has gone so horribly wrong. See, for examples, Hoover's Great Depression or LBJ's Vietnam War or Bush's Iraq War or Trump's Covid-19 War.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 10:40 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea.

Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. The new work, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first — the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.

Much more at www.scientificamerican.com/article/living-a-lie-we-deceive-ourselves-t
o-better-deceive-others/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Glad you're doing research to figure out what's wrong with you.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 10:46 AM

Yeah, pretty much.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 10:49 AM

LOL

Cool.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 11:02 AM

If you could reason with Trump supporters, there would no longer be any.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, July 24, 2020 11:08 AM

We wouldn't have Trump in there if it weren't for you people.

Take some accountability for your actions, and remember those words when you've got four more years of Trump come November.

Every single thing you claim other people are doing is exactly what you yourself have done.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 25, 2020 6:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
We wouldn't have Trump in there if it weren't for you people.

Take some accountability for your actions, and remember those words when you've got four more years of Trump come November.

Every single thing you claim other people are doing is exactly what you yourself have done.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Having voted for Trump, you can take credit for all that he has done. What has he done? He cancelled all nuclear weapons treaties and increased the National Debt by $20 trillion, but hasn't brought back jobs from China nor deported 22 million illegal aliens. Before you blame the Democrats, Trump needs written plans, not tweets, to describe how he'd accomplish his wonderful promises. Sorry, there are no written plans, just the tweets. Yet you feel good about Trump's second term where he finally finishes removing 22 million illegal aliens. Funny how Trump, in 2017, stopped making estimates of how many aliens were in the US and never restarted the effort to count them. He didn't want you to know he failed to do anything. He even wrote an executive order only last week to NOT count them in the Census. The less you know for a fact, the better for Trump, as far as holding him accountable.

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-excluding-illegal-a
liens-apportionment-base-following-2020-census/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 25, 2020 8:49 AM

If they're not counted it the census, it won't be long till the sanctuary cities turn on the illegals themselves. But as long as that free Federal money keeps pouring in, it will further promote bad behavior.

My vote for Trump in 2016 in Indiana was as meaningful as your vote for Hillary in Texas in 2016.

But sure. I'll take credit if you're going to force me to. Trump is a great president.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 25, 2020 9:46 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
If they're not counted it the census, it won't be long till the sanctuary cities turn on the illegals themselves. But as long as that free Federal money keeps pouring in, it will further promote bad behavior.

My vote for Trump in 2016 in Indiana was as meaningful as your vote for Hillary in Texas in 2016.

But sure. I'll take credit if you're going to force me to. Trump is a great president.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Trump made promises that he could have delivered. Removing illegal aliens was a great one. He already had all the authority he would ever need to do it. The only thing missing? A plan. A plan was never made. Another promise Trump made was about negotiating better nuclear weapons treaties. Again, he already had all he would ever need to do it. The only thing missing? Negotiations never got started. Trump let all those treaties expire. Trump is very bad at executing tasks, but he was bad at that as a businessman and very likely he will get worse at performing the ordinary tasks, such as deporting aliens or negotiating, in his second term. What would his motivation be to do better in the future that he didn't have in the past?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 25, 2020 10:18 AM

In six weeks we start mail in voting. In three months, Trump is thrown out of office. All the shit you guys are posting about what he is trying to do will disappear, will be reversed.

Then, if not sooner, his trials will begin.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 25, 2020 11:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
In six weeks we start mail in voting. In three months, Trump is thrown out of office. All the shit you guys are posting about what he is trying to do will disappear, will be reversed.

Then, if not sooner, his trials will begin.

Trump's legacy will be with us after he is dead: $20 trillion increase in the national debt will be with us. Nuclear weapon treaties? Those treaties are dead and that could kill us. Covid-19? It will still be killing citizens and wreaking the economy. Trump can't be punished for any of those because that is too partisan in a country where incompetence is a partisan issue, but income tax evasion can be punished. I hope Trump's tax returns get an audit that kills Trump's fortune with penalties and interest on his unpaid taxes. Income tax evasion put this President in jail: South Korea’s Former President Park Geun-hye Is Jailed for 24 Years. Why not Trump? He is hiding something criminal in his returns. I want to know what.
www.wsj.com/articles/south-koreas-former-president-is-jailed-for-24-ye
ars-1522998828

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 25, 2020 11:41 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
If you could reason with Trump supporters, there would no longer be any.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, July 25, 2020 12:45 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:

If you could reason with Trump supporters, there would no longer be any.

If you could reason with the extremes, left and right, there wouldn't be any.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 6:33 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Emails to Trump's people show how energy industry helped repeal methane rules

Methane, which leaks from oil and gas wells, accounts for about 9.5% of greenhouse gas emissions (measured in pounds www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases ) from human activity in the United States, according to EPA data. But pound for pound, the comparative impact of methane is 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period. Do the math. Methane is a bigger deal than CO2 in global warming.

Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the head of a fossil fuels industry group requested a call with the president’s transition team. The subject: Barack Obama’s requirement that oil and gas companies begin collecting data on their releases of methane.

That outreach, by Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, appeared to quickly yield the desired results.

“Looks like this will be easier than we thought,” David Kreutzer, an economist who was helping to organize the new president’s Environmental Protection Agency, wrote of canceling the methane reporting requirement in an email to another member of the transition team on Feb. 10, 2017.

Three weeks after that email, the EPA officially withdrew the reporting requirement — and effectively blocked the compilation of data that would allow for new regulations to control methane, a powerful climate-warming gas.

Fossil fuel industry players, working with allies in the early days of Trump’s EPA, engineered the repeal of the methane reporting requirements with no internal analysis, then created the rationale for the decision after the fact.

That repeal illegally delayed the development of additional regulations to reduce methane emissions that the Trump administration did not want.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20200726100948/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/us-world/article/New-Emails-Show-How-Energy-Industry-Moved-Fast-to-15434297.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 8:04 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:

If you could reason with Trump supporters, there would no longer be any.

If you could reason with the extremes, left and right, there wouldn't be any.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

What's with the "enlightened centrism?"

I assure you that I can be reasoned with. There's nothing extreme about what I believe.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 1:00 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:

If you could reason with Trump supporters, there would no longer be any.

If you could reason with the extremes, left and right, there wouldn't be any.

T

What's with the "enlightened centrism?"

I assure you that I can be reasoned with. There's nothing extreme about what I believe.

Can you? Your post about Biden definitely came from the radical left. You know it's easy to point fingers when you pay no mind to how things were during different times. Or lack understanding of all the issues that go into making a decision. You claimed you have been forced again and again to vote for the lesser of two evils. That's what happens in congress as well. Poor Joe has gotton stuck again and again voting for the lesser of two evils, mostly because of the far right and left. Bidens in the middle but left leaning. That's right were our elected officials should be.

Some on the left want to tear down the Lincoln Monument. How about you? Do you think it should be torn down?

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 5:23 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:

If you could reason with Trump supporters, there would no longer be any.

If you could reason with the extremes, left and right, there wouldn't be any.

T

What's with the "enlightened centrism?"

I assure you that I can be reasoned with. There's nothing extreme about what I believe.

Can you? Your post about Biden definitely came from the radical left. You know it's easy to point fingers when you pay no mind to how things were during different times. Or lack understanding of all the issues that go into making a decision. You claimed you have been forced again and again to vote for the lesser of two evils. That's what happens in congress as well. Poor Joe has gotton stuck again and again voting for the lesser of two evils, mostly because of the far right and left. Bidens in the middle but left leaning. That's right were our elected officials should be.

Some on the left want to tear down the Lincoln Monument. How about you? Do you think it should be torn down?

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

Biden is solidly Republican. Look at his record. He's a POS and I fully believe he raped that woman.

Your Lincoln claim is suspect. Lots of people say "the left wants..." but they really can't point to anything.

I'll vote for Joe because he's slightly less repulsive than Trump, but not by a whole lot. If you think everything will be fine once he's in charge, you've got another thing coming.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 5:24 PM

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 5:29 PM

She's bulimic. And retarded.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 5:31 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
She's bulimic. And retarded.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You misspelled "an award-winning academic and expert slayer of bigots."

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 6:53 PM

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 9:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
She's bulimic. And retarded.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You misspelled "an award-winning academic and expert slayer of bigots."

No. It's spelled bulimic retard.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, July 26, 2020 10:27 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Just your daily remainder that this guy got his first professional job . . .

I didn't believe it until I checked: Donald Barr (Attorney General Bill Barr's father) was headmaster of the Dalton School from 1964 to 1974.[10] During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite Epstein having dropped out of college and being only 21 years old at the time.[11][12] In 1973, Donald Barr published Space Relations, a science-fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who perform child sex slavery. It has been noted that Epstein's crimes are similar to the plot of Barr's novel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Barr#Career

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 27, 2020 7:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The second argument for withholding one’s vote from Biden is that it makes little or no difference who becomes president or which party controls the House and the Senate. In my view this is hardly ever correct. On matters such as judicial appointments, environmental regulations, and civil rights, to name just a few, it typically makes a big difference who is in power. If someone thinks there is no significant difference between a Ruth Bader Ginsberg and a Brett Kavanagh, or that the scrapping of a hundred environmental protection rules has no important impact, then they will be hard to convince on this point. But in the present situation, I believe the idea that it will make little difference who is elected is truly naïve.

More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/07/defeating-trump-takes-preced
ence-over-everything.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 27, 2020 9:23 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The second argument for withholding one’s vote from Biden is that it makes little or no difference who becomes president or which party controls the House and the Senate. In my view this is hardly ever correct. On matters such as judicial appointments, environmental regulations, and civil rights, to name just a few, it typically makes a big difference who is in power. If someone thinks there is no significant difference between a Ruth Bader Ginsberg and a Brett Kavanagh, or that the scrapping of a hundred environmental protection rules has no important impact, then they will be hard to convince on this point. But in the present situation, I believe the idea that it will make little difference who is elected is truly naïve.

More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/07/defeating-trump-takes-preced
ence-over-everything.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Yup. This here is the most important reason why Trump needs to win.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, July 27, 2020 10:01 AM