What's in the News? 2.0

[Kathadon]

Damn it :(

It is not all bad. Support SPART*A's efforts.

[Andol]

It is not all bad. Support SPART*A's efforts.

I have to admit this constant use of the Executive order to just wipe away things like this is just getting out of hand. Is this just going to be the back and forth whenever a new party gets in the White House a ton of new Executive Orders like what Biden will be signed to get rid of the last administrations policies? 

[ShadowFox89]

If only there was a way to reform things so it wasn't just an us vs them situation. Nah, better say both sides are bad.

[Haibane]

Someone tried that "There are good people on both sides..."

It didn't go down well

[Haibane]

I had heard a lot of terrible things about Islamic extremist attacks in Africa. Now that their efforts in the Middle East have been largely contained, Africa is their next target, for no other reason it seems, than simply terror. Their aim is to execute non-Muslims and destroy facilities established by western nations. This is a longish report from Palma, northern Mozambique of the attack there in March 2021. Its very grim viewing. It concerns me that the UN and NATO appear to be silent on this situation so far.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-57672606

This is the evil, depraved and wicked face of organised religion. It sickens me that these events take place in the name of a god.

[Sabot]

I have to admit this constant use of the Executive order to just wipe away things like this is just getting out of hand. Is this just going to be the back and forth whenever a new party gets in the White House a ton of new Executive Orders like what Biden will be signed to get rid of the last administrations policies?

Short cuts in a representative republic are just never a good idea. Just one example, the Paris Climate Accords...or whatever it is they're calling it. One man, Obama, imposed this on the U.S., and another man, Trump, removed it. Had it been treated as the treaty it so clearly is, it would have been handed off to the Senate for ratification. Had it been ratified, Trump would not have been able to simply cancel it. The ratification process was designed in part to make sticky, problematic international agreements difficult to accomplish. The idea has to be good, or it's weeded out in the ratification process. Obama, and his supporters knew the Paris accords would never survive the ratification process, and opted instead to implement this back-channel international agreement through regulations imposed by various federal departments, all of which fell under the executive umbrella. Obama was not the one who discovered this loophole. He wasn't the first to use it, nor will he be the last.

Unfortunately, We The People, allow this to happen. The House allows this to happen. The Senate allows this to happen. The -constant- partisan bickering in this country needs to take a backseat to the actual needs of this country. I just don't see that happening any time soon.

[Kathadon]

Unfortunately, We The People, allow this to happen. The House allows this to happen. The Senate allows this to happen. The -constant- partisan bickering in this country needs to take a backseat to the actual needs of this country. I just don't see that happening any time soon.

Allow is not a strong enough word for congress people in the U.S. This is working as intended by the parties in power. Neither side wants to fix things anymore. Nor do they really want to lead in a meaningful way. They just want a cudgel to beat their opponents with, and rally their partisans. All while keeping themselves and their personal brand of oligarchs at the status quo.

An excellent example is climate change. Any Democrate that was being honest and "followed the science" would be forced to impose radical caps on carbon emissions, shuttering entire swathes of the economy. At the same time they would be mandating nuclear power along with solar and wind five years ago. From logistics, to transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing all these industries would be radically changed if not highly curtailed, or in some cases banned outright. Gone would be next day Amazon deliveries for example.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/10/16/20917467/amazon-one-day-shipping-bad-for-environment

Another easy example is just look at the average power consumption rate of any of Alphabet's server farms year over year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumption-of-google/

This is unsustainable and even with carbon offsets (ie: virtual scams that earn environmental brownie points, and have little actual affect of climate change) they cannot continue to grow like this if we are truly "following the science." But no one can run on this because in our democracy they simply would not get elected. Telling folks they are going to have to suffer inconvenience if not out and out hardship is not a winning election strategy even in Blue states. This is before the corporate powers even spent a dime, and if it looked like somehow the people were behind such an effort these supposedly "environmentally conscious liberal ally" companies would back a corporate friendly primary opponent, or the Republican, to a degree that would make our heads spin.

So instead on this and a host of other issues, the folks in congress hem and haw over little things at the margins, and ceded more and more power to the executive branch. Because that office has a term limit and at the best case they get two (maybe if they are lucky?) out of eight years to push an actual legislative agenda. Then the agenda can swing back again to status quo all so the congress people can kick the can down the road, focus on getting re-elected, rally against the other side, and hope it does not bite them or their donners in the ass.

[Kakihara]

Canada Day: Discovery of more unmarked graves fuel calls to cancel holiday

As an American, I have no opinion on the cancelation of Canada Day. But as someone with Seminole blood, I wish more was taught and more information was out there about the evil of these 'missionary' schools'.  They were a subversive Christian tactic to create cultural genocide if they could not complete a physical one.  Young men of tribes were forced to attend, to cut their hair and never speak their language, everything enforced with draconian measures.  Many people know about the forced marches and the camps and the small pox blankets, but I feel like this is one of those matters rarely touched on. And to see how many physicals lives were taken by them now as they explore more and more of these sights and find unmarked graves, is just horrifying.

[Sara Nilsson]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xqva/gettr-is-the-trump-teams-buggy-leaky-twitter-clone

So Team Trump has launched a new social media platform called GETTR. And other than being a twitter clone it is.. not good. Also some far right peeps are already whining it isn't free speech as someone made an account for Hitler and it got banned.

[Oniya]

And other than being a twitter clone it is.. not good.

I'm not so sure that's a positive point about it either.   

[Sabot]

Allow is not a strong enough word for congress people in the U.S. This is working as intended by the parties in power. Neither side wants to fix things anymore. Nor do they really want to lead in a meaningful way. They just want a cudgel to beat their opponents with, and rally their partisans. All while keeping themselves and their personal brand of oligarchs at the status quo.

The two party system favors and works for the two parties in the system.

[TheGlyphstone]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xqva/gettr-is-the-trump-teams-buggy-leaky-twitter-clone

So Team Trump has launched a new social media platform called GETTR. And other than being a twitter clone it is.. not good. Also some far right peeps are already whining it isn't free speech as someone made an account for Hitler and it got banned.

I'm a helpless nerd so I had to check, but Getter Robo is spelled with 2 E's, so we can't try and get a copyright takedown attempt from anime giant robots.

[Haibane]

I often weep and tear my hair out on here over the US gun culture but in the UK we have a terrible spiralling knife culture, and this particular report of a random death of a wonderfully gifted and promising young life, in early 2020, had me in tears. Just because of the stupidly random awfulness of why people do this, for no reason but ego.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57698248

I sometimes wish I had the powers of a minor god and could simply strike evil people down, giving them the pain and loss they deserve for the acts they commit. Is that wrong of me to hate so much?

[Iniquitous]

I often weep and tear my hair out on here over the US gun culture but in the UK we have a terrible spiralling knife culture, and this particular report of a random death of a wonderfully gifted and promising young life, in early 2020, had me in tears. Just because of the stupidly random awfulness of why people do this, for no reason but ego.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57698248

I sometimes wish I had the powers of a minor god and could simply strike evil people down, giving them the pain and loss they deserve for the acts they commit. Is that wrong of me to hate so much?

Totally off topic here but to answer your last question...

Horrible things happen for hundreds of reasons - most of which, if not all of them, we will never understand.  The people who do those horrible things are not "evil".  Angry. Misguided. Drug addicted. Mentally ill. Drunk. Stoned. Jealous. Etc. But none of those are "evil".  Evil is not a black or white definition.  It is not a yes or no. 

To feel anger at atrocities is natural - to hate the atrocities is natural.  To hate a person, even if they perpetrated the atrocity, is wrong.  All you are doing is poisoning yourself with that hate.  Doesn't affect the person/people any.  Hate the act, not the perpetrator. Pity the one who acted in such a manner - pray for them if that is in your belief system. Just understand that hating and wishing horrible things to those people ultimately hurts -you-.

And back to on topic - something a little less volatile (though still disturbing in a totally different way)....

A man parasailing at a resort on the Red Sea had a -shark- leap out of the water and bite off the back of his foot.  ( https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/shocking-moment-sharks-leaps-out-of-water-and-bites-parasailors-foot/news-story/9157328beb2d0345aea1f9e1650b3569 )

And here I stay out of the ocean so that I do not become dinner and they are leaping into the air to eat us!

[Haibane]

US policeman who is harassing activists plays a Taylor Swift song on his phone so that the video cannot be uploaded to You Tube - and explains that's why he's doing it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57698858

Video then goes viral and is still on YT after 180,000 hits.

Seriously, US police need either better training or better vetting on application.

[Sara Nilsson]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/02/thomas-robertson-cop-arsenal-weapons-capitolriot/

Active duty cop takes part in the insurrection, is told by judge to surrender his guns. Doesn't do so, home is raided 8 guns taken from it. Pleads with judge, can I have guns back plz.. no.

FBI gets some info that he is buying guns.. raids home

38!!! guns taken, and a pipe bomb.

Our men in uniform...

[Annaamarth]

I often weep and tear my hair out on here over the US gun culture ...

Honestly, I think the problem is only gun culture - kinda.  In the UK it's only knife culture - kinda.

I think the problem is violence-culture.  The culture where it's okay to whup the shit out of your kids and show them that violence is an acceptable path for enforcing your will and desires, that links "violence" and "manhood."  In America, it's the part of gun culture that says "a gun is a tool" the same time 'law-abiding gun owners' post selfies of themselves holding their rifle in a military-style carry position.

A power drill is a tool too, but you don't see selfies of power drills held in the same way - because firearms have been made into a symbol of manhood.

Some data

On homicide rates

According to the IHME, the homicide rate - that's ppl killin ppl, regardless of method, unlawfully and deliberately - per capita in the UK dropped fairly significantly in the UK - from 1.1 homicides per 100,000 to 0.5, in a slow, steady, downward tick - but a net reduction in rate of 50%!  That's good.

In Germany, those numbers are a little higher - from 1.2 to 0.8, with an upward tick in 96-97.

Denmark went from 1.5 to 0.8, Sweden from 1.7 to 1.2.

Canada went from 2.2 to 1.5 - a similar downward track in rate.

The US has had ... higher numbers.  In 1991, we had 10 homicides per 100,000 people, almost ten times the UK's homicide rate.  In 2013, we had it down to 5.6, but then it started to tick back up - in 2017, where the UK had a homicide rate of 0.5 per 100,000, the US had 6.1 per 100,00 - over twelve times the rate.

Russia has had a rough go, but since 1994 Russia went from 38.1 to 14.8 in 2017 - so it sounds bad, but that homicide rate has come a long way down.

Knives, arson, guns, whatever.

So ... if it helps at all, know that the homicide rate has tended to drop across the board in US, Germany, France, UK ... most of the countries that are big in the news.

Compare to a lot of less developed nations, and ... well, trending down per capita no longer becomes something you can assume.  Mexico's homicide rate started climbing in 2007, and these numbers don't account for military violence or ethnic cleansing.

Now, this data does end in 2017, and of course a lot has happened in the last four years - but I don't know that it's all doom and gloom, even with gun culture and knife culture.

On the news front, the Gulf of Mexico caught fire.  Pemex says pipeline leak - and it wasn't like the whole Gulf caught fire.

Speaking of fire, a bunch of Catholic churches keep being on it in Canada.  I think a lot of people are a little upset at how the Catholic church keeps downplaying what happened in their schools.  Trudeau has denounced the burning and vandalism, of course, and upon reflection I think he's right to do so - but I can't really blame First Nations people for their anger, or feel real regret at the burning of those churches.  Of course, with the current weather conditions, anything that can turn into a wildfire is a Bad Idea, but ... looping back on homicide rates, there were about 150,000 children in residential schools.  If 3000 children died, which is a very low estimate, and if my ability to perform mental math hasn't failed me, that's a death rate of 2,000 per 100,000.  Kinda puts those other numbers in context, no?

In case anyone feels the urge to not-all-Christians, yes - I know the Anglican, Presbyterian, and other churches have apologized, confessed and are, at least on some level, owning their role in residential schools.  That's not the conversation at hand, but if this whole chain of events makes you deeply uncomfortable as a Christian, I'd like to suggest this 10min video by Reverend Ed Trevors from the 25th of June.

[Humble Scribe]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xqva/gettr-is-the-trump-teams-buggy-leaky-twitter-clone

So Team Trump has launched a new social media platform called GETTR. And other than being a twitter clone it is.. not good. Also some far right peeps are already whining it isn't free speech as someone made an account for Hitler and it got banned.

With any luck it will spiral into the same pit of howling despair that Parler did, for much the same reasons. (I'm still half convinced Parler was part of some GRU disinformation warfare campaign given its founders and backers Russian ties).

Free speech is great, but completely unlimited free speech ends up with 8kun and people posting child pornography.

[Haibane]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/02/thomas-robertson-cop-arsenal-weapons-capitolriot/

Active duty cop takes part in the insurrection, is told by judge to surrender his guns. Doesn't do so, home is raided 8 guns taken from it. Pleads with judge, can I have guns back plz.. no.

FBI gets some info that he is buying guns.. raids home

38!!! guns taken, and a pipe bomb.

Our men in uniform...

Have you a link please that's not behind a paywall?

[Haibane]

Oopsie, sorry I managed to find one.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/former-cop-charged-capitol-attack-amasses-weapons

[Lustful Bride]

Well looks like Japan will have either Pig Kaijus, or a radioactive version of the invasive Wild Boar problem we have here in the states.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/radioactive-hybrid-pigs-now-roaming-area-surrounding-fukushima/ar-AALI9gh?ocid=msedgntp

[Lustful Bride]

With any luck it will spiral into the same pit of howling despair that Parler did, for much the same reasons. (I'm still half convinced Parler was part of some GRU disinformation warfare campaign given its founders and backers Russian ties).

Free speech is great, but completely unlimited free speech ends up with 8kun and people posting child pornography.

Well it seems like the site is definitely getting flooded with pornography

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-allies-new-anti-censorship-app-for-conservatives-has-already-been-overrun-with-porn-reports-say/ar-AALJdvG?ocid=msedgntp

That just makes me imagine the kind of conversations that are happening now X3

"No no, honey I wasn't looking at Porn! I was just....Supporting President Tru...you know what hun? Yeah, fuck it I was lookin at porn."

[Annaamarth]

Well looks like Japan will have either Pig Kaijus, or a radioactive version of the invasive Wild Boar problem we have here in the states.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/radioactive-hybrid-pigs-now-roaming-area-surrounding-fukushima/ar-AALI9gh?ocid=msedgntp

Neat! Life-uh-finds-a-way.gif

Seriously, I think it's cool that as soon as we abandoned the area, wildlife moved in.  Fukushima, as bad as it was, was nowhere near a Chernobyl in terms of distaster...ness, and calling these "radioactive boar hybrids" sounds like media fearmongering to me.  Also, those boar were mentioned in 2017 too - so ... slow news day, I think.  Here's a study on those boar from last year and the dose that would be received by those who ate the boar.  Yeah.  Ate radioactive boar meat, not happened to live near it.  Of course, since people in Japan do eat the wild boar, they figure out what the exposure might be.  It's ... not a lot.

If the residents consume the wild boar meat as a meat source once, the median committed effective dose was in the range of 0.062 to 0.30 μSv/day, with a maximum value of 5.4 μSv/day.

In order for that exposure level to matter, you'd have to eat wild boar that gets you ~.5 μSv/day, roughly 1.5 times the high end of the median band, thirteen times before your internal contamination levels reached a point of concern- that being a sustained dose of 5mSv per year.  Which is still kinda low.

Some trivia about radiation and exposure

The exposure levels that they're looking at moving people back into are looking at an extra mSv above background per year.  For context, Japan's non-emergency exposure limits (and this would be monitored for, for example, radiation workers, xray techs, etc) are 100 mSv/5yr period, not to exceed 50 mSv in any single year for men, and only 5mSv/3mo period for women - a protection in case of unexpected pregnancy, I suspect.  The average dose received by nuclear power plant workers from APR2014 to MAR2015 was 1.64 mSv on average, with no single worker receiving more than 40mSv in the course of that year.

By contrast, the US limit for radiation workers is 12.5 mSv per calendar quarter under normal circumstances, which comes out to the same 50mSv limit above, except spaced out over the course of three examinations over the year.  Taking an emergency action for infrastructure protection and public welfare can raise their exposure limit to 100mSv for the year, lifesaving medical response to 250mSv, and critical lifesaving/infrastructure missions - like pulling a Spock in Wrath of Khan to save a crapton of people from disaster- effectively remove the limit, but any risk of more than 500mSv cannot be taken without informed consent - basically "You probably gonna get cancer." 

A trip to the moon buys about 75mSv, and best guess is that a three-year Mars trip would be about 1200mSv - assuming no solar flare occurs.

About 4.2Sv is the LD50 for acute exposure outside hospital care - but medical intervention can even give ~8.2Sv a 50/50 shot, so yay hospitals.  Generally, 5Sv is considered the "you're in for a bad time" point, and 12+Sv of exposure is the "your dead in a matter of days" point.

The levels of exposure from radioactive boar? Negligible, unless your diet includes substantial amounts of the boar which Japan made it illegal to eat back when the Fukushima disaster first happened.

Well it seems like the site is definitely getting flooded with pornography

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-allies-new-anti-censorship-app-for-conservatives-has-already-been-overrun-with-porn-reports-say/ar-AALJdvG?ocid=msedgntp

That just makes me imagine the kind of conversations that are happening now X3

"No no, honey I wasn't looking at Porn! I was just....Supporting President Tru...you know what hun? Yeah, fuck it I was lookin at porn."

I mean ... the American demographic you're talking about isn't ... on the whole, big on spousal communication or equality.  More about "traditional family roles."

So ... I dunno there would even be that much conversation in many of those cases.

That said, I'm probably just speaking my bias.

[Haibane]

Trump hasn't created an account at that place yet and quite possibly he won't since he's all about "me, me,me" and the forum is all about "tits, tits, tits" so if he's not the centre of attention (er, in fact THE only focus of attention) he won't like it.

Which is a shame, because to see an ex-president joining a social media site full of porn would be kinda funny and pretty much sum him up. Maybe they will have a dildo store account next to his?

[Haibane]

As NATO pulls out of Afghanistan and Taliban attacks on Afghan domestic forces increase I am reminded of Vietnam and how, once the west ceased to prop up a local regime, it collapsed. I can see this happening here with an extremist Islamic regime taking over to the detriment of people's freedoms, especially women.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-57724652