quote:

Tobin said in a statement released Tuesday morning that he "prayerfully considered" Pence's request but decided that assisting the refugee couple with two small children was an "essential part" of the Catholic church's identity.
A spokesman for Pence says the governor respectfully disagrees with the decision but wants Indiana residents to be welcoming to the couple and their two young children.

Muscle Tracer posted:

strange indeed that a pacifist or isolationist would not enter the war industry

quote:

Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.

Swagger Dagger posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PbdyJ_ybSI

The Iron Rose posted:

One would hope that it would be the other way around, that becoming an expert in an area would determine your ideology, rather than letting your ideology determine what you specialize in.

CalmDownMate posted:

For those who aren't taking this seriously...

Lessail posted:

Why would one hope that?

The Iron Rose posted:

Because it would mean that someone decides their political beliefs based upon evidence? Rather than deciding what evidence they want to look at selectively based upon... I suppose you could call them a priori beliefs?

I'd rather people base their ideologies based upon evidence rather than look at evidence from an already biased position, or ignore that evidence entirely to preserve the integrity of their politics.

Lessail posted:

I don't think it should be tied to an area of expertise then since one could become insulated in that culture

The Iron Rose posted:

What I'm trying to get at is that more people should test their political beliefs by examining and researching poo poo that will likely support a differing political outlook. Failing to do so is hardly a great sin, there's a ton of areas of law and politics I've not studied and plenty of those would challenge my beliefs. But testing your own politics is only ever a good thing, and can only lead to a more informed electorate and a more nuanced understanding of politics. And that is, I think, a good thing.

quote:

(Washington, DC) – The United States government and tobacco companies are failing to protect teenage children from hazardous work in tobacco farming, Human Rights Watch said today, in a report and video.

The 72-page report, “Teens of the Tobacco Fields: Child Labor in United States Tobacco Farming,” documents the harm caused to 16- and 17-year-olds who work long hours as hired laborers on US tobacco farms, exposed to nicotine, toxic pesticides, and extreme heat. Nearly all of the teenagers interviewed suffered symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning – nausea, vomiting, headaches, or dizziness – while working on tobacco farms.

“Teenage children too young to legally buy a pack of cigarettes are getting exposed to nicotine while they work on US tobacco farms,” said Margaret Wurth, children’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “The US government and tobacco companies should protect everyone under 18 from hazardous work in tobacco farming.”

Tobacco farming in the US puts children at risk of nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure from toxic chemicals applied to the crop, heat illness, and chronic pain and injuries from performing repetitive motions.

Some US-based tobacco companies and growers groups took action in 2014 to ban employing children under 16 to work in tobacco farming, but excluded older teens from their policies. Teenagers are still vulnerable to the harmful effects of the work, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch conducted field research for the report in July 2015, in eastern North Carolina, and interviewed 26 children ages 16 and 17, as well as parents, experts in farmworker and adolescent health, and tobacco growers. Beyond routine exposure to nicotine, many of those interviewed reported working in or near fields that were being sprayed with pesticides, or re-entering fields that had been recently sprayed, and feeling suddenly ill with headaches, nausea, difficulty breathing, burning eyes, and itching noses and throats.

Almost all the teenagers who spoke to Human Rights Watch worked 11 or 12 hours per day in extreme heat, without suitable protective equipment, inconsistent access to toilets, and no place to wash their hands. Very few had been given any safety training or health education about the hazards of tobacco farming.

Quorum posted:

A lot of people have fond memories of their first lovely job down at the local movie theater or what have you when they were 16. "Builds character" and stuff like that. You might be able to get people behind banning industrial work under 18, but there's no way in hell you'll ever get people behind banning farm labor-- too many rural teenagers grow up working on their parents' or a nearby farm. Even before sixteen, too. It's a weird grey area I don't think the law even looks at much.

quote:

INSKEEP: Final thing, because you're right. Science changes. Science evolves. Our knowledge evolves. And here's something that Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary, argues is evolving. You've said, "Well, look, it's really expensive to address this issue, and so I don't want to do it; I don't want to put a burden on people."

Moniz pointed out on "All Things Considered" the other day that the cost of renewable and alternative energies has been going down drastically; that technology is constantly advancing. And on a basic level, of course, pollution is inefficiency. If you can be more efficient, it actually saves people money. If you found out that global warming or climate change, whatever you want to call it, was cheaper to address than it seems to now, would you change your view of it?

CRUD: Of course, there will be alternative energies. We will have innovation. And I promise you this, the alternative energy innovations are not going to come from Washington. They're not going to come from the cronyism of this town. They're not going to come from Solyndra. They're not going to come from corporate welfare of Washington picking winners and losers.

Niton posted:

It's also largely harmless for most crops. Tobacco is specifically terrible but there's no reason for a blanket ban on teenagers helping out with most other things.

quote:

US laws and regulations offer less protection than most tobacco company policies on children’s work in tobacco farming. Under US labor law, it is legal to hire 12-year-olds to work unlimited hours outside of school on a tobacco farm of any size with parental permission, and there is no minimum age for children to work on small tobacco farms or farms owned and operated by family members.

The Iron Rose posted:

The point I was trying to get across was that I think that more people, from all political walks of life, should feel free to specialize or at least look into fields, into avenues of political thought and analysis that you normally wouldn't expect them to. So I think it's a shame that pacifists/isolationists tend to avoid specializing in international/national security, because that field will absolutely challenge those beliefs and I think to do so would be more... I almost want to say intellectually rigorous. Or, for example, I also think it's a shame that many libertarians (or communists for that matter) don't seriously study economics. I feel sad for the creationists who don't study biology, for the atheists who don't study religion, because it means their politics are untested and necessarily without some level of nuance.

Muscle Tracer posted:

Uh, a moment ago you weren't talking about "studying" something, you were talking about them making it a career. Why would anyone choose to dedicate their life, or indeed any amount of time, to something that repulses them unless they absolutely had to?

RevKrule posted:

One of the more nauseating Daily Show pieces was from last year when they dealt with tobacco farms and kids.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/l0fvyd/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-nicoteens

The Iron Rose posted:

Then I expressed myself badly, but again, the point is that it's stupid to dismiss an entire field of knowledge as repulsive without making any serious effort to engage with it.

Scott Forstall posted:

zoux posted:

He's gonna be real mad about the Grammys.

e: it's in some stupid MSNBC video, but Jeb just called Trump's proposal "dog whistle politics" so maybe Republicans don't actually know what the term means.

Scott Forstall posted:

mrfishstick posted:

You'll never guess who bought the Singular Edition Wu-Tang Clan album:

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-martin-shkreli-wu-tang-clan-album/

I'm just going to keep telling myself this guy is the most dedicated performance artist in history and this is all an act.

zoux posted:

Trump is saying Muslims are dangerous and scary but he knows that people know he's really saying that Muslims are dangerous and scary.

Muscle Tracer posted:

They're weighing whether to include people ineligible to vote as part of the population when determining districting, which would slightly diminish urban voting power. link

zoux posted:

He's gonna be real mad about the Grammys.

e: it's in some stupid MSNBC video, but Jeb just called Trump's proposal "dog whistle politics" so maybe Republicans don't actually know what the term means.

zoux posted:

He's gonna be real mad about the Grammys.

e: it's in some stupid MSNBC video, but Jeb just called Trump's proposal "dog whistle politics" so maybe Republicans don't actually know what the term means.

blue squares posted:

It's totally a dog whistle. The secret message is that muslims are dangerous terrorists.

Fried Chicken posted:

Reminder that Jeb wanted to ban non-Christians from the refugee program, which is a stricter religious tests that what Trump is proposing

euphronius posted:

Zoux the dog whistle is "kill all the Muslims everywhere".