Finicums Wake posted:

there was a late surge in the polls towards trump which put him over the edge, so i can understand why people think comey decided the outcome.

but that surge is better explained by an absolutely massive flood of dark money, one which flowed into republican senate campaigns all across the country during the final weeks in a seemingly coordinated fashion. it brought a lot of trump-skeptical republicans out to the polls that might have otherwise stayed home, resulting in a kind of reverse coattails effect that put him over the edge.

this happened at the same time as the comey statement, so nerds like nate silver have hyped the theory that if it werent for comey hillary wouldve won. but i think they're missing the real reason for that late bump in polling

edit:
the paper i got this from:
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploa...-8-Jan-2018.pdf
start reading at pg. 19 if you want specifics on spending late in the campaign

vyelkin posted:

Over time everything gets steadily more expensive and you start not being able to always buy whatever you want, either because it's now out of your price range or because there are actual shortages of things like coffee. Weather gets more severe and less predictable. People you know have their homes and livelihoods destroyed by extreme weather events and have to decide whether to rebuild or start over somewhere new with nothing. If you're unfortunate enough to live somewhere like the desert (lol Phoenix, Arizona) then it will become actually unaffordable to live there at all because you'll spend more on air conditioning than you make in income. Every summer you hear about hundreds of elderly people whose air conditioning broke and they died of heatstroke in their own home. Diseases that haven't been seen in your country for decades or centuries start to reappear, like malaria. Diseases that have never appeared in your country before, like Zika or Dengue, also start to appear. Mosquitoes seem to be the one insect that isn't dying out.

Insurance stops covering a lot of climate change-related damage, so as extreme weather events hit other parts of your country and people aren't able to rebuild where they lived, places like southern Florida get abandoned, not from some government plan, but from millions of people individually deciding to pack up and leave one day. The place where you live gets more crowded as internal migrants relocate only to find that life isn't any easier when they show up out of the blue with no job, no money, and no assets to sell. Your wages get cut at work because there are suddenly ten highly trained unemployed professionals who used to do your job in Miami, any of whom would gladly replace you. Your rent goes up even faster than usual because of all the population growth in your city.

The news is full of stories of weather destroying other parts of the world like Mozambique and Puerto Rico, and conflicts breaking out in areas hit by drought, famine, and disease. It's also full of stories about migrants trying to come to the developed world. It never mentions that the two things are connected, and never explores the fact that the migrants are moving because they can no longer live in their homes because their fields dried up, it didn't rain for ten years, and the desert swallowed their town. You notice the people around you getting more and more anxious about migration as their own incomes are getting stretched thinner and thinner and there are only ever more and more migrants. Electorates vote in more and more extreme right-wing figures who ban all immigration, militarize the borders, and implement ever-more draconian surveillance and monitoring of people inside the country as well. You're repeatedly told that if you're a natural-born citizen and not breaking any laws, you have nothing to fear.

Global supply chains start to break down as some regions of the world get less and less livable and some resources get either more difficult to extract and process, or get wiped out by climate change themselves, making prices rise even more and shortages hit even harder. As places start to see economic decline, people get restless and there are instances of mass unrest. On the news you see stories about mass demonstrations and massacres in random other places around the world. But here people are too busy working five gig economy jobs just to afford bread, they're too busy to protest. Governments get overthrown, countries descend into civil war, millions die in armed conflict, famine, and ensuing disease outbreaks. This further exacerbates the millions of people already trying to migrate to the less-affected developed world, but by this point our borders are so hardened that most of them die before they make it here. Deaths of hundreds or thousands of people trying to cross our borders across oceans and through deserts stop even making the news because they're so routine and we're too concerned with our own daily survival to worry about people we don't know.

What you do see on the news are feel-good stories about how a billionaire CEO now flies around in a solar-powered plane and he planted trees on his green roof. Meanwhile our cities are more choked with smog than ever, and the numbers keep getting higher. Fewer people are smoking than ever before, but lung cancer rates seem to be higher than ever. You get a particularly bad cough and you'd like to see a doctor about it, but they cut your benefits at work so you just hope it goes away on its own. The UN releases a report saying that we have three years to act if we want to avoid 8 degrees of warming, but by this point we've read so many reports saying we've already passed the tipping point that no one cares.

All our topsoil is vanishing and by this point even some people with jobs literally can't afford food. But the state is militarized enough that no one really thinks about protest except for the occasional spontaneous riot that doesn't accomplish anything long-term. Facial recognition software and ubiquitous surveillance and tracking means protesting is a one-way ticket to prison, if you aren't literally killed or maimed by the police breaking up the protest. And anyway, even attending a legal protest harms your social credit score and means you won't be able to get a loan the next time food prices spike and you can't afford enough to get through the week. Drug abuse, overdoses, and suicide are all rampant as people lose hope and decide to numb themselves or end it quickly rather than die slow, painful deaths. There are people literally starving to death in the streets and every summer you're pretty sure some of the homeless people lying on the sidewalk have died of heatstroke. Half the food you used to see in supermarkets is just plain gone, wiped out by disease or unable to grow where it used to or the supply chains that used to ship it in from halfway around the world have collapsed completely. The other half of the food is so expensive that you can only afford to buy the barest essentials. The wars on TV get worse as countries invade each other to get at the farmland that remains. Despite the police everywhere, law and order seems to be breaking down in your city, there are enormous waves of robberies, burglaries, home invasions, murders, as desperate people do whatever it takes to get through another day. The rich are comfortably secure in gated communities protected by private mercenaries with tanks and machine guns, who regularly use lethal force to defend their employers' property.

Eventually you die. If you're lucky it's in some extreme weather event and it's over quickly. If you're unlucky you starve to death because you lost your job and bread is too expensive. I hope you don't have kids because they still have a few more decades in this miserable hellhole, while civilization continues to collapse around them. They probably eventually die deaths even less pleasant than yours.

Some humans will survive, even in 15 degrees of warming. Our civilization won't.

paul_soccer10 posted:

joepinetree posted:

The other thing that I don't think gets much play with regards to Warren is that by all indications she is a careerist. There's a bunch of things that people tend to focus on in isolation, and will generally get dismissed as a goof, but to me clearly indicates that her morals are very flexible when it comes to something that can advance her career. To list a few:

- The whole Native American thing and academia hiring
- leaving the republican party within 12 months of moving to MA
- Stayed neutral and then endorsed Clinton in 2016 a few hours after Obama did, in the process stating that she was ready to be vice president if called upon.
- Once she entered politics, she was full throated in support of Israel, going as far as defending the bombing of hospitals, but once she decided to run for president she went suspiciously unspecific on Israel
- Voted for all military budget increases as a member of the Armed Services committee, up until 2017. 2018 she suddenly grew a spine and voted against it, but didn't explain what was different this time.
- Was strongly in support of school vouchers and tying school funding to standardized tests, up until a pivot this month at the NEA conference

In other words, outside of bank regulation, she has a very long history of taking the position that is the best strategic move for her career. Sure, one or two of these can be dismissed as she being misled or as a coincidence, but all of these make a pattern. Especially when running against the guy who was saying the same thing even when it was unpopular.

joepinetree posted:

But my point wasn't that Warren has terrible policies, though she does. My point was about all the strategic conversions just as the moment that it is most advantageous to her.

The one thing I left out was campaign funding. In 2018 she was all about big donors (only 55% of her senate campaign funds came from small donors, compared to 75% for Bernie). Her main fundraiser is a big money in politics guy. But in her primary campaign she is all about decrying big donors, big fundraisers. Another conversion that very conveniently lines up with her facing Bernie. And a conversion she has already said won't stick for the main event.

loquacius posted:

1) Black people don't like her (anyone who dislikes Bernie will probably accept this as an intrinsic fault of the candidate)
2) Her "plans" are literally just Bernie's plans from 2016, compromised in some way that involves a lot of numbers, which college-educated white people perceive as good because numbers are smart, but which is, get this, in actuality bad
3) Donald Trump will eat her alive
4) Everybody's over the genetic-testing thing by now but it's a great example of how Donald Trump will eat her alive
5) She is at the end of the day a Harvard professor and presents herself as the platonic ideal of "teacher" which won't play in a general election as well as it does with college-educated white Dem primary voters

Most importantly to me, though, she's a Party Loyalist with a bunch of wonky ideas. That's strictly better than a party loyalist without any new ideas (Biden, Pete, Beto, Harris) but if the American left wants to win in the 21st century it has to realign itself to embrace a class-based politics, and ensure that it's on the right side of it rather than ceding it to the loving fascists, and you won't get that with someone who's not willing to take on Party orthodoxy. Bernie will do that. Warren won't.

Once again, anyone who likes Warren and dislikes Bernie will probably admit this, because let's be honest, it's the main reason a lot of them like her. They don't want to challenge Party orthodoxy, because that would necessarily involve a tacit admission that the Democratic Party is wrong about something which doesn't compute for them. But if you want to change the way the Party works, you have to stand up against it. That's just a fact.

gradenko_2000 posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://npeaction.org/elizabeth-warren/

quote:

Testing – F

2015

During the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Hearing Fixing No Child Left Behind: Testing and Accountability, Senator Warren’s comments indicated that she views high-stakes standardized tests as the measure that must be used to hold States accountable for the federal tax dollars they receive.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/greg06897/status/1141540331818819586

gradenko_2000 posted:

Elizabeth Warren's 'big money' rejection doesn't apply to general: 'We've got to be willing to win'

quote:

“Republicans come to the table armed to the teeth,” Mrs. Warren said on MSNBC Monday night. “They’ve got their wealthy, wealthy donors, they’ve got their super PACs, they’ve got their dark money, they’ve got everything going for them.

“And I’m just going to be blunt: I do not believe in unilateral disarmament. We’ve got to go into these fights and we’ve got to be willing to win these fights,” she said.

quote:

This is a war Iran welcomes. Since the Islamic Revolution, literally every resource they could expend on military has been geared towards an eventual war with America. A war specifically tailored to how you'd win against America. I'm an Iranian myself and I think you have to be to fully understand the mindset the IR and IRGC. Well actually, it's a mindset that any nation that has been hosed with by America would understand. The desire isn't to just defend Iran from America. It's to humiliate America. It's to knock America down a peg, to put America in its place and to humble America. Because to them, and the rest of the world frankly, there is no country more arrogant than America.

For just Iran alone, they had to deal with some assholes coming into their country and being like, "Nah, I don't like this guy. We're gonna overthrow him and put in the guy we like." And of course, when Iran has the loving gall to decide they don't like that, America decides they need to not only change things back to how America likes it but that they also need to punish Iran. So then Iran has to deal with being fresh off a revolution where they're trying to stabilize only to have their neighbor coming at them with America backing them. Not only that, America gives them chemical loving weapons. Iran not only has to spend eight years, spend countless money that isn't going to its people, have bombs constantly hitting its civilian cities, and expend 500,000 lives to win the war, but they also now have tens of thousands of soldiers that were lucky enough to not be among the other tens of thousands who died instantly to nerve gas but are of course unlucky enough to spend the rest of their lives dealing with complications of chemical weapons that slowly and painfully kill them. Then within this time period there's also the Iranian passenger plane shot down by the US that kills 290 people. But of course, America is now also telling them they can't even have a loving nuclear program. How in the gently caress can Iran see America as anything but the most arrogant nation to ever exist? This isn't even taking into consideration the countless atrocities America has committed everywhere else.

So for Iran, nothing would cement a victory more than to utterly humiliate America. And if war does break out, exactly that will happen. Qasem Soleimani, the mysterious, quiet and reserved leader of the IRGC would go down as the smartest general in history. Iran welcomes an arrogant country to come to it and try to wage a war they cannot win. Many, many Iranians would die. Many Americans would as well. I don't need to repeat John here but America would be fighting an asymmetrical war. That is not a war the US military is made for. It's made for conventional war with an imaginary Soviet enemy in mind. What in the gently caress are massive carriers and war ships going to do about hundreds of speedboats coming at them? What will the Navy do about land to land missiles that would destroy every Arab city in the gulf? They would instantly have no drinkable water, 20% of the world's oil would suddenly be cut off, and of course massive financial industries being destroyed would tank the world economy. What is the Army going to do, come in from Iraq? Good loving luck getting through that terrain. All while leaving all your bases in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed for hits. You're gonna need more bodies than the military has to try any invasion which would still fail and leave all those bases empty. Some given Afghan child already causes massive ruckus for these bases by shooting a pellet gun nearby which forces every military member there to be on alert not be able to sleep so they can spend time to figure out that a pea shooter went off into the sky. But now you want to leave those bases mostly empty so that proxy forces wreak havoc on them?

Speaking of which, proxy forces would not only be going off in the Middle East but all over the world. Like I said, the IRGC has spent four loving decades setting everything in place so that there's chaos everywhere the moment America decides to start a war. Israel would get its dick rammed in by a Hezbollah force that already kicked their rear end a decade ago except they'd have no reason to hold back at all now. They'd go for Israel directly. Saudi Arabia is a loving joke and not even worth discussing. The other unfortunate truth would be that there would be attacks in America too. Again, not in any typical warfare sense. But in the form of what Americans know as terrorist attacks. Except I have no loving idea how you can call it a terrorist attack when your nation is trying to get into theirs in the first place. Why in the gently caress would Iran not cause pain in America? That's just war. But of course, American arrogance and exceptionalism tells you that's absolutely not ok. Only we get to gently caress with other countries.

And this is where poo poo gets even more bleak. Nukes would start to be considered. Openly and publicly. And you know what? America would support it. Why the gently caress wouldn't they? Americans haven't had to deal with significant amounts of American lives being killed since Vietnam. Except in this case, not only would they be dying by the carrier and boatloads, they'd be dying here too. Can't wrap your mind around that? Try being literally any nation America has gone to war with. So now we have to nuke a country. This is all, mind you, happening while our country is being led by a guy whose brain has deteriorated from syphilis for three decades who'd more than likely give his speech on going to war with Iran and go on a 20 minute tangent about how Helen Mirren hasn't been a good actress in decades and how he used to be friends with Madonna until she became a bitch by not showing up to his parties at Trump Tower. Literally the only thing deciding the fate of the world would be some dimwit at US Central Command who may or may not have a moment of clarity and realize, "Oh, this isn't 1945 and nukes aren't this new thing and if we used them to commit genocide in Iran it would also be the end of America." But no, because he's more likely go on to correct me in his dumb rear end military smug attitude, you know the one, about how Central Command isn't in charge of nukes but why the gently caress would I know or care anyway.

Anyway, like I said, because America has done everything it possibly can to convince this country that it is the greatest thing on Earth and in history and that American exceptionalism is right and good, Americans would support nuking Iran because Iran dared to defend itself and fight back. All because this stupid loving country has pounded into the heads of every dumb American that it can do no wrong. That we are the greatest country ever. That if anyone fucks with us, it's over for them. And for loving what? For loving what is this country great for for any given American? It's the greatest country in the world because every American spends their life subsidizing Lockheed Martin executives? Because every American spends their whole lives subsidizing the pockets of billionaires? Because no other country has been smart and good enough to convince all its people that, actually, it's a good thing that they bend over and get hosed their whole lives? To amount to what? No, we're not the greatest country on this Earth because we have the best healthcare or best education or best civil rights or best quality of life for its people. We're the best because nobody else can eat poo poo better than us, enjoy it, and ask for more.

This all is without saying assuming a lot of things. Would everything go this way? Maybe not. Would Iran cause the havoc that it seems they would? Maybe not. But signs show that it there would be no winning for us. We saw there was no winning with Iraq and yet Iran is many, many times the threat Iraq ever was. War with Iran would be loving bleak. Your life as you know it could likely never be the same. You may get drafted. Your homes and cities might get destroyed. Your family members may die. This country will come out of it broken and poor. Russia and China would take their rightful positions as the new superpowers. America would be humbled for once, and if it used nukes, it would finally be put in its place by the world too who no longer would need to pamper a weak and humiliated America.

Stop taking your families and loved ones for granted. If you have any lasting grievances with your family that you can get over, make amends with them. If you have a significant other, stop for sunflowers on your way home from work tomorrow and surprise them. Bring them some bread and jam to bed in the morning. If you have kids, hold them close and never let them doubt your love. If you want kids, be extra weary of bringing them in this chaotic and increasingly unpredictable world. Because for once, America may experience a sliver of what a given Palestinian or Yemeni is experiencing right now. It would never come down to this for America but you may for once live a life of instability where you don't know what's next. It won't just be some blind thing you, at best, vaguely are aware about. Your child could inexplicably die before they were even old enough to make sense of what death is, let alone understanding what powers that be lead to this. Something none of us really can make sense of as it is. You may better understand the Palestinian mother who has to hold their cold lifeless child and wonder why God is allowing this to them.

Again, this is all the worst (though within reason) case possible. But why risk any of it?

Gripweed posted:

I have a theory about ASMR. So much of our human interaction is through the internet. Texting, talking to people online, etc. And that's not even getting into para-social stuff like following people's instas or listening to podcasts. It's human contact, but it's completely devoid of actual human presence. The tiny, subconscious things that you get when you're actually in a room with someone. Breathing, someone talking in your ear, the sounds of eating. And that's what ASMR is. The little cues of actual physical presence that are removed by digital communication, compressed and packaged in a marketable, consumable, digital format. With an ad in front of it.

Flowers for QAnon posted:

Can someone help me with why we should fully decriminalize illegal immigration? I’m all for amnesty and not uprooting people who have started lives here (in the US) but am having trouble addressing this point. I think I’m missing the big picture or I still have a few remaining brain worms.

galenanorth posted:

These videos have all been posted before, but it's been a while since they were posted and I thought it'd be helpful to have all the Kamala Harris and Joe Biden videos and video Twitter threads all in one post.

https://twitter.com/WalkerBragman/status/1090058561634426880

Kamala Harris literally believes that Democrats believe 'no one should have to go to jail' even if they rape and murder, because she asked that at a California meeting and she interpreted the universal show-of-hands to mean that everyone forgot that crime happens. Perhaps the people at that meeting meant that society should pursue policies which lead to people not committing crimes, considering that healthcare leads to a 5.8% reduction in crime rates, even though there are going to be people that commit crimes no matter how much we improve the system because that's human nature. I wasn't there at that meeting, so it's not like I can know for certain what they meant, though. The prequel video is the "we all have these signs in our closets that say 'build more schools, build less jails' video.

Bonus: https://twitter.com/walkerbragman/status/1090331815573897221

For Biden, during the debate he literally sought credit for undoing policies he instituted in the first place and no one mentioned he helped institute them.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1087514447458062336

https://twitter.com/zaidjilani/status/1116535209216937984

https://pmd.cdn.turner.com/cnn/big/politics/2019/03/05/caption/joe-biden-tough-on-crime-speech.cnn_2494757_768x432_1300k.mp4
from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html

To this day he has not recanted on the death penalty and if even if he did, he'd say all the much longer sentences and all those death penalty provisions were worth it for a 2.8% drop in crime from the bill putting 100,000 more cops on the street and also these other provisions he cites.

https://twitter.com/eshalegal/status/1082338164587540483

Nichael posted:

I hope it's appropriate to post this here, but I really liked Gripweed's post explaining ASMR from November 2018. Mostly because I find ASMR to be mystifying as a phenomenon, and it gave me some context for why it exists.

Flowers for QAnon posted:

Can someone help me with why we should fully decriminalize illegal immigration? I’m all for amnesty and not uprooting people who have started lives here (in the US) but am having trouble addressing this point. I think I’m missing the big picture or I still have a few remaining brain worms.

Matewan posted:

Union men, my rear end! You wanna be treated like men? You wanna be treated fair? Well you ain't men to that coal company- you're equipment, like a shovel, a car, a hunk of wood brace. They'll use ya- til you wear out, or you break down, or you're buried under sleet fall; and then they'll get a new one. And they don't care what color it is, or where it came from. It doesn't matter how much coal you can load, or how long your family has lived on this land- if you stand alone, you're just so much poo poo to those people. You think this man is your enemy? Huh? This is a worker! Any union keeps this man out, it ain't a union- it's a Goddamn club! Now they've got you fightin' white against colored, native against foreign, holler against holler, when you know there ain't but two sides to this world- them that work, and them that don't. You work, they don't. That's all to know about the enemy.

Flowers for QAnon posted:

Can someone help me with why we should fully decriminalize illegal immigration? I’m all for amnesty and not uprooting people who have started lives here (in the US) but am having trouble addressing this point. I think I’m missing the big picture or I still have a few remaining brain worms.

A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:

just say "a human being can't be 'illegal'" and if they disagree they are literally a fascist

Grand Theft Autobot posted:

Yes, but all her programs are means-tested, which means:

1. They will have much less political viability than universal programs. If higher income people can send their kids to public college for free, they probably will, and they probably will vote to keep it around.

2. Means-testing raises the costs of programs because now you need a verification and enforcement system. You end up spending shitloads of money that should just go to free college on bureaucrats, IT staff and infrastructure, and other bullshit, just to verify that somebody qualifies for free college.

3. Means-testing is demoralizing and degrading, like all charity is, and making people jump through hoops for it is garbage. The other fundamental problem with charity is it subjects the recipient to the domination of the philanthropist. Think of those bills to make EBT cards huge and orange, or restrictions on what an EBT card can buy. The point is to inflict emotional harm on people. So you'll end up with a free college bill that excludes certain majors and prevents people from doing what they really want to do.

These things are true for all of her dumbass means-tested policies, whether it's tuition, debt forgiveness, Medicare buy-in, or whatever else.

Broken Machine posted:

It's me, I'm the Bernie supporter who didn't vote for Clinton in '16. Here's why: in the 2008 primary season, I voted for Clinton in the NH primary because I was familiar with her, and I liked her policies with respect to education, science etc.(I voted for Obama in the general both times, and the 2012 primary). I was working for a large multinational financial company at the time, doing computer geek stuff. I walked away from a nice salary and comfortable position in a job that I largely enjoyed for a considerably uncertain future in the middle of 2008. I did so because it was the right thing to do; in my view my company was pushing profits over people and I couldn't support that. Two weeks later, the economy crashed and we got the great recession. I don't regret that choice, and things worked out for me, but it made life considerably more difficult for years.

In the time between 2008 and 2016, Clinton made absurd amounts of money to tell bankers what awesome people they were and how it wasn't their fault. The fact that the Clintons made tens of millions of dollars doing this during past decade leading up to 2016 (literally well over 100 million dollars!) bothered me to the point that I couldn't vote for Clinton, and I sure wasn't voting for Trump so I went third party in the general. In my view, if you're getting paid 250k for a speech at Goldman Sachs to tell them how great they are after they just mortgaged the world, to the point where you and your hubby make a nice 100 mil+ at it, you probably shouldn't be president.

galenanorth posted:

Here is a timeline:

May 5, 2016: "Bernie Sanders's accusation that Clinton is running a "money laundering scheme," explained" -- Vox

This was likely the very last major primary attack by Sen. Sanders on Sen. Clinton. At this point, there were plenty of attacks from the DNC/Clinton camp in the opposite direction. On the same day,


June 6, 2016: The Associated Press announces that Clinton has enough delegates left to win, though there are still a month's worth of primaries remaining. The spokesman for the Sanders campaign says that they will focus on convincing superdelegates. LA Times)

July 12, 2016: Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary Clinton at a joint rally in a Portsmouth, New Hampshire high school gymnasium. (CNN)

September 5, 2016: Bernie Sanders holds his first solo campaign event for Hillary Clinton in Lebanon, New Hampshire. (ABC News)

September 5, 2016: "Bernie Sanders is finally campaigning for Hillary Clinton. But does she even need him?" -- Washington Post

Amber Phillips writes that he has only given two speeches in support of Clinton at this point, not in a swing state, and refers to them as papered-over versions of his own stump speech.

September 30, 2016: "Bernie Sanders to step up campaign schedule for Hillary Clinton" -- USA Today


October 8, 2016: "Bernie Sanders Packs Schedule With Campaign Stops for Hillary Clinton" --Wall Street Journal


November 2, 2016: "Bernie Sanders Abandons Clinton in Final Week" -- Observer, which endorsed Trump in 2016.


Frankly, I do not trust any politician to do the right thing without being constantly pushed by voters, in much the same way there is a feeling of apprehension during every scene of Lord of the Rings where Frodo puts on the One Ring to hide from ringwraiths. Though I disagree with the premise, I included this article to reflect the variety of articles on the topic.

November 4, 2016: "Bernie Sanders’s Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton" --New Yorker

In Raleigh, North Carolina,


For more articles, see the Google results for "bernie campaigns for clinton" restricted to April-November 2016.

----

For years afterward,

September 5, 2017: "Leaked excerpts from Hillary Clinton's book show she's mad at Bernie Sanders" -- Vox


February 4, 2019: "Ex-Clinton staffers slam Sanders over private jet flights" -- Politico
regarding the usage of such transportation to arrive at rallies in different swing states on consecutive days in October

August 14, 2019:

https://twitter.com/KeyDecision1/status/1161498610976079873

Finicums Wake posted:

a couple good warren criticism posts from the primary thread/succ zone:
(note: will keep editing them in as i find them, then delete this part that says note)

twoday posted:

Finally I can post poo poo like this with the firm knowledge that it won't be the craziest thing in the thread. Anyway, none of this is really crazy, it's all well-sourced. But if you want to hop down into the warp-tunnel and skip ahead to Epstein Brain Level 99, read this:

~~~

The Cow on Pedo Island: A Detailed History



~~~

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. THE CANAANITES
2. THE PHOENICIANS
3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE
4. THE OLD GODS
5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE
6. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN?
7. MOLOCH
8. EPSTEIN
9. POSTSCRIPT

~~~

1. THE CANAANITES



So the Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, or the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, the Jordan River valley). It was not a specific term but a catch-all term, and not one that is really used today. Many of the groups living in this area in ancient times were Semitic peoples, and as time went on they branched off into various groups. The two which you might have heard of are the Jews and the Phoenicians (and also Carthaginians).


I will refer to these groups as the Phoenicians.

2. THE PHOENICIANS

The Phoenicians are, I think, one of the most fascinating of the Ancient Mediterranean cultures, and one of the least understood. They did a lot of cool stuff. They invented the alphabet, from which just about all other alphabets are derived (even Sanskrit!).They were the finest seafarers in the world in their day, and circumnavigated Africa in the 6th century BC (something which was recently replicated in a replica Phoenician ship), they invented the olive and set up a vast trade network to sell the oil and thus "lit up the world" by providing one of the first convenient cheap fuels for oil lamps.It's even been speculated that they discovered America more than a 1000 years before the Vikings

They were originally based in the area of Lebanon, and eventually founded Carthage in Tunisia, one of the coolest ancient cities:



The old Phoenician cities in the Levant were eventually conquered, but Carthage flourished in the western Mediterranean as the capital of the Carthaginian Empire. Then the Romans appeared on the scene, and started fighting with everybody. For a long time, the Cartheginians and the Romans were the main two powers in the Western Med and ended up bitter enemies engaged in existential warfare. The Carthaginian Hannibal (whose name contains "Ba'al," remember this) came close to conquering Italy, but didn't. Then Rome conquered Carthage.

3. THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE

I mentioned that we know little about the Phoenicians (and the Carthaginians). There are three reasons for this:

1) They were very secretive. They were super rich, and made this money through having a monopoly on trade goods and trade goods. For instance, to make bronze you need copper and tin, so both were pretty important. Copper is all over the place, but there are very few places in the world where you can mine tin.



While the waters of the Med are pretty calm, the waters in the Atlantic were really dangerous in those times. There were tides, currents, and trade winds which nobody understood. Except the Phoenicians. They were the only Mediterranean civ to go really go beyond Gibraltar. They traded with the Celts of Spain, France, and England, and developed a monopoly on tin, which they sourced from Druids in Cornwall. They went to incredible lengths to maintain their secrets. For instance, once a Roman ship tried to secretly follow some Carthaginian ships beyond Carthage to see where they were going. The Carthaginian captain steered them into a dangerous area filled with rough seas and sharp rocks, causing the Roman ship to sink, as well as his own small fleet. Almost everyone died, but the captain made it back to Carthage. Not only was he reimbursed for the loss of his ships, he was also lauded as a hero and handsomely rewarded, because he maintained the secret that kept their whole empire running. They also lied to everyone in the Mediterranean, telling them that the Atlantic was not navigable and full of sea monsters, so that nobody would even try to go there.

2) They were considered the bad guys by the primary predecessors of Western Civilization. The Romans hated them, and so did Jews (I'll explain why in a second). They were the Other and the Enemy, and they were spoken of almost exclusively in the worst of terms. Almost everything written about them was black propaganda, and not really reliable historical information.

3) Their culture was systematically exterminated. During the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, the Romans grew to despise the Carthaginians. Carthago delende est! or "Carthage must be destroyed!," as you may remember Cato saying in the Roman Senate. He would end every speech he gave this way, no matter what the topic of the speech was. It became ingrained in the Roman psyche that Carthage must be utterly wiped off the face of the earth if they were ever defeated. When the Romans finally invaded Carthage they killed 500,000 people, burned the city down and then went through the ashes tearing apart the rubble so that no building was left standing, and then they went out into the fields and literally salted the earth so that no crops could grow. 50,000 were enslaved and dispersed throughout the Empire. And though they brought writing to much of the world, most all of their own writing was systematically destroyed except for a small handful of books which the Romans copied, such a treatise on olive growing, a text which became the basis of an entire sector of the Roman economy. It was rumored that some Carthaginian leadership escaped to a secret island somewhere, but no evidence of this has been found.

So we have almost nothing left of their culture except some ruins and a book about olives.

4. THE OLD GODS

Their were two reasons everyone hated them - their wealth, and their religion.

The Isrealites were descended from Semitic people in the Levant, and so their ancestors worshiped the same ancient Semitic pantheon of gods and goddesses that was worshiped by the Phoenicians. However, if you are a keen reader of the Bible, you might have noticed that they became monotheistic at some point. At this point the worship of the Old Gods and their likenesses became forbidden.


This is from the ten commandments, as given to Moses by God himself on Mt. Sinai. He was up there alone for a while. My suspicion is he was there for quite some time, probably fasting and getting into some intense trance state. I suspect this because he was gone long enough that when he came back, some of the Isrealites had reverted back to the old Religion and set up a statue of a golden calf and were worshiping it.



Moses didn't like this; neither did God.


So from then on, the Israelites really didn't like the worship of cow statues. In the Bible it became kind of a symbol of the old polytheistic religion of the Levant which was specifically forbidden by God in the ten commandments, and comes up elsewhere in later books.

And even though this old Canaanite religion became symbolic of everything that was wrong and backwards, the Jews and the Canaanites (a.k.a. Phoenicians) weren't enemies because of this. A Phoenician King even helped sponsor Solomon when he was constructing of the first temple in Jerusalem, as they were allies at the time.

The Romans were the ones who really hated the Phoenicians, and the thing that really irked them was another aspect of their religion that developed, and you guessed it, it was...

5. CHILD SACRIFICE AND THE TOPHET OF CARTHAGE




Seems bad! However,


It seems that at some point the ancient Canaanites did practice child sacrifice, and then began substituting the children with animals and other offerings. Remember the story of Abraham? The one that is the basis of the Abrahamic religions of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam, the basis of most of all religious worship on the planet Earth? Well the story of Abraham is about him deciding to kill his child because God told him to, and then being told not to once God told him that he was just kidding and just wanted to see how far he would go. Just a prank, bro!

Abraham lived, according to the Bible, before the Jews were captured by the Egyptians. That is, he was an ancient Canaanite, and this story would have been known to the Jews and other Canaanites long before, and therefore was probably integrated into the Phoenician religion as well, which developed later. The Phoenician tophets have plenty of animals that were used as ritual substitutes for children, and this would seem to indicate that this was also acceptable. This is also what the Jews did in the first Temple period, sacrificing animals instead of kids (see: Leviticus), which would make their animal sacrifice seem like an act of mercy. "Yeah there's blood everywhere, just be happy I didn't do it to your family." Which is a good point, and will keep people allied with the people who sacrifice animals, and keep them in fear of the other bad people out there who might actually sacrifice children. In a way, it's just a giant protection racket that makes everyone follow the faith. "Do what we say, because the alternative is that something horrible will happen to your family.

The evidence of child sacrifice was the conclusion drawn by the first archaeologists who excavated the site in the 1970's, and the reason he thought this was the case was because it is something that is often repeated in Roman tirades about how evil the Carthaginians were, and explaining why Rome should go to war with Carthage. So, it's not the most reliable and objective source. And once something is written in history books by someone who made a major discovery, it takes a Herculean effort from later scholars to overturn it, because by then it's already canon.

Now, this leaves us with two possible interpretations of the Tophet of Carthage:

1) The Phoenicians practiced ritual child sacrifice all the time, they couldn't get enough of it. They were an entire massive culture of just straight up evil motherfuckers murdering children left and right, killing children and harnessing that dark child murder energy as the source of their power, and what keeps their empire going, and what keeps them wealthy and in control of the international economy. That's a bit difficult for me to believe, but not impossible; ancient times were pretty crazy.

This interpretation was pretty much what the Roman Senators were saying all the time as they were banging the drums of war. It's how they got everyone in Rome to despise Carthage, and agree that it must be destroyed. By promoting these ideas and this sentiment they were able to justifiably invade and conquer and obliterate their main political and economic opponent and use the spoils of war to double the size of their Empire. So I'm remiss to trust the Romans on this.

But the thing is we know almost jack poo poo about Phoenician religion because the Romans systematically obliterated them and all traces of their culture that they could get their hands on. And also they became the basis of all of Western Civilization so this bias is fundamentally ingrained in our culture.

2) The alternative interpretation of the Tophet which other archaeologists support is that the Tophet represents a necropolis, and was where the Carthaginians respectfully cremated and kept their dead kids in urns. Keep in mind that at this point in history infants and children had a really high rate of mortality from disease, complications at childbirth, etc. If the kids who died of natural causes aren't in the tophet, then nobody really knows where they are.

In this interpretation, the Romans were actually the bloodthirsty ones. While trying to drum up support for war and expand their empire, they came up with a smear campaign against the Carthaginians based upon their religion. The Roman religion (which they just straight up stole from the Greeks, and changed the names) was also polytheistic, but with very different roots than that of the Carthaginians, and the Senators took advantage of this. At the time of the Punic Wars the Romans mostly buried their dead, and the Carthaginians practiced cremation. They could have also heard of the story of Abraham and twisted it to say, "Look! Their God encourages Child Sacrifice! You can't let them be in charge of anything!" And this story is still the basis of our knowledge of Carthaginian religion because the Romans did an excellent cover-up of whatever the truth was. They built up sentiment and mistrust against the mysterious Middle-Eastern religion of the Carthaginians and then used this as a reason to perpetuate a genocide of a Semitic people for economic gain and the expansion of Empire.

6. WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? HOW THE gently caress IS THIS RELATED TO EPSTEIN, LIKE, AT ALL??

Understanding this history, as well as the way this historical narrative developed and was presented is absolutely essential to understanding everything that has happened since then, because this the story of how the Romans ended up in charge of the Mediterranean, which gave them the resources to build up the Roman Empire and take control of Europe. The destruction of Carthage enabled the rise of the Rome, which in turn determined the fate of Europe, and thus all of Western Civilization for the last two thousand years. Understanding this story is essential if you want to understand the DNA of Western culture. I'll get to Epstein in a minute, I'm at the crux of the argument right now though, so pay attention.

Now, to get to the cow, and move a bit further forward along the timeline of history:

Christianity grew out of Judaism, and incorporated into it all the stories from the Hebrew bible, including the stories of Abraham as well of that of the Golden Calf. The Romans adopted Christianity and spread it through Europe. The empire eventually collapsed, but their ideas did not. While all the books written by the people who invented the alphabet are lost, those of the Romans survived, being carefully copied and studied and repeated for thousands of years, with all the later societies of western Europe being based upon them. The idea that there are still people out there from the Levant who were practicing "The Old Ways" (which included child sacrifice) was politically expedient for Rome during the Punic Wars, but it espoused with such intensity that it never really went away. That idea is still floating around in our society today and continues to shape the trajectory of western Civilization. It warped and changed a bit over time, but the core of it remains. First of all, since the genocide of the Phoenicians was largely written off as a success, and that religion extinguished, the animosity of the original Roman anti-Carthaginian antisemitism was carried over to the other Semites which were encountered in western Europe - The Jews. One way to look at the history of antisemitism in Europe is that it is the story of the descendants of the Romans hating the descendants of the Canaanites. It's a loving ancient conflict which was fought throughout the middle ages, and the 20th century, and continues to be fought by some today.

This has manifested in various ways at various times, but one essential and constantly recurring theme has been human (often child) sacrifice and the worship of a false god (often symbolized as a bull). Somewhat ironically, these ideas are essential to Judiasm as well, but historically they have been used by the Christians of Europe to persecute the Jews.

First, there was the idea of blood libel. Jews were viewed as suspect, practicing an old religion which most people associated with human sacrifice, etc. A well-known example of this would be Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice when Shylock the Jewish Merchant demands a pound of human flesh as repayment for a debt. But often whenever there was a murder in medieval Europe would blame the local Jews for this and a bunch of them would be executed. This is how the Jews ended up being banned from England in the 13th century. Wherever they fled to these rumors would follow them, and the local xenophobes and preachers were often quick to recite the verses in the bible about Abraham and Leviticus, and accuse the Jews of murdering children. Eventually this idea became so widespread that it became the common understanding of people that one (secret) part of the Jewish religion was that they had to murder one Christian baby every year if they wanted to appease their allegedly bloodthirsty Jewish God and be allowed to return to Jerusalem. This imagined payment of Christian child blood to the Jew God is known as blood libel. These stories, in one variation or another, became widespread throughout Europe, the same way everyone reading this knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood. So the Jews were met with the same accusations wherever they went, and stories of Jews eating children were widely believed through the early 20th century. This narrative was exploited by all the local Christians (whose most holy city was what? Oh yeah, Rome), and the Jews were exploited as a scapegoat by the local authorities for economic and political gain (ironically, the concept of the scapegoat also comes from the Hebrew bible. For examples of this, one can think of the Spanish Inquisition or the pogroms in the Russian Empire. These beliefs began fading away first in Western Europe in places like the Dutch Republic, where Jews became an integral part of society, and later in Eastern Europe, paralleling the timeline of the spread of Christianity across Europe but with a delay of about a thousand years. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in 1919 in Russia, and said that the Jews secretly run the world and eat children, which was later recycled by the Nazis. However, even god drat Hitler realized it's hard to make people believe in the 20th century believe that Jews literally sacrifice children, so he slightly modified the idea a bit to describe the Jews as a parasitic minority eating away at the health of the German people. And they bought it.

7. MOLOCH



Besides Christianity in medieval Europe, there were also lots of esoteric religious beliefs based on a mix of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, kabbalah and other Jewish texts, and a bunch of poo poo that people just made up. Think of alchemy, or Rosecrucianism, or Freemasonry. There are a bunch of others. These people dug up a bunch of ancient ideas and reworked them and adjusted them to fit their whims. This is how Moloch emerged as a theme in conspiracy culture. Let's see what wikipedia entry has to say on the matter.


Ok, so Moloch is based on anti-Canaanite stuff from the bible, including the Golden Calf. But it also fits very well with the European bias against Semites, and also is just a loving perfect thing to talk about if you are a good Christian who hates the Jews, because not only does it explain why you think the Jews are backwards and terrible, but you can also refer to the Christian bible for proof of all your claims. Read the wiki article about Moloch if you want to dive into a two thousand year old cesspit of circular arguments about why the Phoenicians actually did sacrifice children. But anyway, the idea of Moloch helped perpetuate the idea of child sacrifice throughout the ages, and still comes up today when people are really pissed off at someone and want to depict them as the worst scum of the earth. This is why people were freaking out about the cow on Epstein's island. It proves he's a Molochian, doesn't it? He had a cow statue, that's the key to all of this!

This is what people actually literally still believe, by the way:

https://twitter.com/ottovonschirekt/status/1158658206387691521?s=20

https://twitter.com/FightRasche/status/1155853574196355170?s=20

I don't believe this myself, because I have an alternative theory to explain the cow that I will get to in a second, but first I will round out every other part of this story, and how it relates to the Epstein Affair.

8. EPSTEIN

Taking all of this into account, we are left with two extreme possibilities which would explain everything that we have read in the past week:

1) There was a ship filled with Carthaginian noblemen which escaped the fall of Carthage, and somehow they not only integrated into Roman society, they managed to take total control of it, along with the rest of the world. They did this in total secrecy for thousands of years, secretly carrying on their sick and depraved religion of child sacrifice through a brutal tradition of blackmail and murder. They have since that time been in control of all aspects of culture and every living human being, and the procession of history has been one massive illusion. Everything you know is a lie, it's all been a hoax perpetrated for centuries and they've managed to cover up all the traces of their misdeeds. We are but the cattle of the worshipers of Moloch.

or

2) This is exactly the same loving story that has been pushed onto the public in Western civilization since Cato was raging in the Senate. It worked for Cato, it worked for the xenophobic English in 1290, it worked for the Spanish Inquisition, it worked for the Tsarists, it worked for the Nazis, and now during the presidency of Donald J. Trump it's working again. All you have to do is make up a story about an evil conspiracy of Jews that want to murder your children, and people will follow you anywhere. There are how many millions of Q supporters now? How many of them literally believe in Moloch? That they were literally sacrificing children for their moon god? poo poo's not real fam, go get some fresh air.

And one could even go so far as to say that it's all made up, it's all a lie, an elaborate psy-op, that the victims are actors, that the murder was a hoax, that it's all just a well thought-out theaterpiece meant to turn your average American against the Mossad and encourage a new era of total mistrust and isolationism.

https://twitter.com/ldrinkh20/status/1161960553465700352?s=20

But I personally think the truth lies in the middle. I think that he was deffo an intelligence asset and loving teenagers and blackmailing people and being blackmailed himself and involved in a bunch of illegal poo poo that he may or may have not had permission to be involved in as an undercover agent. And then something went wrong or too much leaked and they had to pull the plug, either by murdering him or putting him into witness protection. And I don't think we will ever know the truth because there intelligence agencies at play putting out disinformation and double disinformation. But I am also kind of thinking that there were some white supremacist trump supporters in on this who were taking advantage of it to promote the ancient myths of blood libel and Moloch to brainwash a bunch of sheeple for their own purposes. But who the gently caress knows? Maybe it's a CIA pay-op to encourage proletarian revolution because they did an analysis and realized it would be in the best interests to have a a more socialist society in its rivalry with China and cooked this up to overthrow the yoke of the capitalist oligarchy (probably not though). The beauty of this sea of insanity is that you can project whatever you want to upon it, and it's broken so many brains that it will keep people talking for generations. Anyway, thank you for reading about the Phoenicians and the history of antisemitism, I legitimately think that more people should know those bits of history and I am glad that I was able to use the death of Epstein to bring some attention to those matters.

If you want to have some fun, try to imagine what Jeffrey Epstein was thinking when he was reading about Qanon for the past two years.

9. POSTSCRIPT

Oh right, and my theory about the cow. Almost forgot. I think that he bought it after one of the CowParades, because that's exactly what a rich socialite in the 90's would do, and got sick of it in his house at some point. Then he realized that he could keep his bodyguard from bothering him if he forced him to move the cow around just because he wanted some personal space (so that he could molest children).

joepinetree posted:

He's not gonna read it, but this paper evaluates both the Warren proposal and the Bernie proposal, and the Bernie proposal reduces the racial wealth gap more.

https://phenomenalworld.org/content...nal_7-19-19.pdf

There are many more Black college graduates with over 50k in debt than White ones.

Key passage:

quote:

The difference between the household wealth distributions in the bottom ventile (centiles 1-20) in the Sanders versus the Warren scenarios indicates why itis that the Warren proposal doesn’t quite match the reductions in racial wealth inequality in the Sanders proposal: because it leaves debt over $50,000 intact, and there are relatively poor households with more than that much student debt. The fact that that gap is larger for black households than for white households (again, comparing the distribution lines forthe Sanders and Warren plans) indicates that there are relatively more such highly-indebted,poor black households than there are such highly-indebted, poor white households. There’s almost no difference between the Sanders and Warren plans above the 20th centile.

I.e., there are far more poor Black households with more than 50k in debt that benefit more from Bernie's plan than there are wealthy households that benefit from his lack of means testing.

Wicked Them Beats posted:

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1163148721909063681?s=19

Wicked Them Beats posted:

I posted that one because it's shots fired at Harris but here's the other tweets

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1163088259192373248?s=20

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1163099701861859330?s=20

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1163110739508441088?s=20

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1163132200642105346?s=20

Wicked Them Beats posted:

Bernie is only getting more powerful.

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1163182245793935360?s=20

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-democrats.html

https://inthesetimes.com/article/22049/elizabeth-warren-2020-bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-democratic-party-dnc

Warren has been privately reassuring Democratic elites and insiders that she's not going to rock the vote, but these stories don't exactly say that she's promising them cabinet positions

Not that I think she wouldn't do that anyway

William Bear posted:

How did this perception start that Warren is to the right of Sanders on healthcare? Their plans are the same. Literally, when asked, she says she's with Bernie and supports his bill.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/14/politics/elizabeth-warren-health-care-plan-medicare-for-all/index.html

Both candidates are against private healthcare.

quote:

The Vermont senator’s office lists a number of possible financing mechanisms for Medicare-for-All, including savings from “obsolete” health tax expenditures, a 7.5 percent payroll tax paid by employers (exempting small businesses), and a 4 percent payroll tax paid by employees, which would apply to all families earning more than $29,000 a year.

quote:

Warren, who hasn’t released her own health care plan, recently added a page on her campaign website about her support for Medicare-for-All, but doesn’t specifically outline how the program would be funded.

quote:

Take for instance Warren’s March town hall on CNN. When asked directly whether she supports Medicare for All, Warren suggested that Medicare for All is merely a slogan for expanded public coverage, rather than a specific piece of single-payer legislation.

“When we talk about Medicare for All, there are a lot of different pathways,” she said, before listing a slew of incremental proposals without explicitly endorsing any of them, from lowering the age for Medicare eligibility to allowing employers to buy in to Medicare. “For me, what’s key is we get everyone to the table on this.”

Bernie Sanders posted:

Let us all be very clear about this: if you support Medicare for All, you have to be willing to end the greed of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. That means boldly transforming our dysfunctional system by ending the use of private health insurance, except to cover non-essential care like cosmetic surgeries. And it means guaranteeing health care to everyone through Medicare with no premiums, no deductibles and no copays. It is imperative that we remain steadfast in our commitment to guarantee health care as a human right and no longer allow private corporations to make billions in dollars of profits off Americans’ health care.

quote:

Like some presidential candidates who have co-sponsored Sanders’ legislation, she’s also signed onto other Senate bills this year that would more incrementally expand coverage. As recently as late May, she told reporters that she supported “multiple approaches” to expanding coverage and if elected would “pull everyone to the table” to craft a health care plan.

quote:

Warren Joins Sanders, 13 Other Senators to Reintroduce Medicare-for-All

quote:

“How do we get universal coverage, Medicare for all? Lots of paths for how to do that,” Warren said. “But we know where we are aiming. And that is, every American has health care at a price they can afford. And that the overall costs in the system are held as low as possible.”

Pressed to be more specific, she added: “There are multiple bills on the floor in the United States Senate. I’ve signed onto Medicare for All. I’ve signed on to another one that gives an option for buying in to Medicaid. There are different ways we can get there. But the key has to be always keep the center of the bulls-eye in mind. And that is affordable health care for every American.”

quote:

WASHINGTON ― In a speech to a liberal health policy conference on Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposed new rules to force private insurers to be more responsive to Americans’ health care needs.

Warren spoke at the annual gathering of the consumer advocacy group Families USA. She emphasized that she wholeheartedly supports efforts to expand public health insurance programs, including a “single-payer” bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would expand Medicare to the entire population.

But in the meantime, Warren said, the federal government needs to impose new standards on private insurers to build on the accomplishments of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

Elizabeth Warren posted:

So job number one is to defend the affordable care act.

Job number two is to make changes where we need to make them right now. Changes to hold insurance companies accountable when they’re trying to cheat people, when they’re trying to scam people. Changes right now, and what’s happening with drugs, prescription drugs. We need to lower the cost of prescription drugs. One in four Americans say they can’t take drugs that are prescribed to them because they can’t afford to pay for them. I have, for example here, a proposal for generic drugs, which are about 90 percent of prescriptions that people fill, to bring those costs down to just a nominal cost.

And the third, how do we get universal coverage. Medicare for all. Lots of paths for how to do that. But we know where we are aiming. And that is, every American has health care at a price they can afford. And that the overall costs in the system are held as low as possible.

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

I guess if you want to go from 0 to educated and alarmed, I'd start with some policy and overview of climate dynamics, and then dive into how our ecosystems are already seeing cascades and collapses.

Policy Overview:
How to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals within Planetary Boundaries: https://www.stockholmresilience.org...20Goals_WEB.pdf

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378016300681

[Add in the IPCC SROCC here when it comes out as an authoritative source on the cryosphere]

Ecosystem Impacts:
Decline in insect biomass (the only major mass extinction that included significant amounts of insects was the Permian-Triassic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
The end of that article is especially depressing imo:


Thiamine deficiency in wild animals is a serious threat to biodiversity: https://www.su.se/english/research/...ersity-1.377252

Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines: https://www.researchgate.net/public...es_and_declines

And an area that I have personally believe will cause mid-century food crises, euphotic ocean acidification and its impacts on the carbonate cycle:
History of Seawater Carbonate Chemistry, Atmospheric CO2, and Ocean Acidification: https://courses.pbsci.ucsc.edu/eeb/bioe159/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Zeebe-et-al.-2012.pdf (this is an absolutely phenomenal primer on carbon cycles in the ocean)

Abrupt onset and prolongation of aragonite undersaturation events in the Southern Ocean: https://www.researchgate.net/profil...d3e0347c54f.pdf

Ocean Apocalypse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMN3dTvrwY

Flowers for QAnon posted:

Can someone help me with why we should fully decriminalize illegal immigration? I’m all for amnesty and not uprooting people who have started lives here (in the US) but am having trouble addressing this point. I think I’m missing the big picture or I still have a few remaining brain worms.

fermun posted:

ok, scrolling through them:

Bernie is #1 among: Teacher, Engineer, Software Engineer, Manager, Sales, Self-Employed, Registered Nurse, Artist, Designer, Project Manager, Student, Software Developer, Analyst, Educator, Nurse, Social Worker, Musician, Contractor, IT, Office Manager, Pharmacist, Farmer, Programmer, Photographer, Driver, Program Manager, Paralegal, Retail, Graphic Designer, Server, Construction, Researcher, Truck Driver, Small Business Owner, Pilot, Nurse Practitioner, Electrician, Education, Therapist.

Warren is #1 among: Professor, Psychologist, Scientist, Editor, Librarian, Psychotherapist

Buttigieg is #1 among: Unemployed, Physician, CEO, Consultant, Real Estate, Business Owner, Director, Marketing, Accountant, Finance, Realtor, Architect, Banker, Vice President, Executive Director, Managing Director, Dentist, CFO, Actor, Management, Business, Financial Advisor, COO, Product Manager, Venture Capitalist, Interior Designer, Filmmaker, Investment Banker, Veternarian, Investment Manager, Communications

Harris is #1 among: Retired, Executive, Writer, Entrepreneur, Producer, Founder, President/CEO, Philanthropist

Biden is #1 among: Attorney, President, Homemaker, Investor, Chairman, Administrator, Real Estate Developer, Principal, Managing Partner, Chiropractor, Investments

Nichael posted:

It'd be wrong to see Warren's results in those two Iowa polls for instance, and not to be worried. But also, that just means you should donate/volunteer more. And remember that President Bernie is useless without a large group of similar minded people also being elected.

Bob Socko posted:

Is there a good post for explaining why “Elizabeth Warren is not an Insane Socialist” to elderly Rockefeller Republicans? Because that’s probably going to be important soon.

mastershakeman posted:

I've said it before but Warren's entire political identity rests on the idea of meritoriously working her way from Oklahoma to ivy league professorship, and Trump is going to pound that by saying the only way she made the jump out of obscurity was the native American check box . She needs a fast, quick soundbite to counter that and since she's entirely incapable of presenting herself in any way beyond schoolmarm she's going to be unable to stop it. It'll destroy her worse than swiftboating destroyed Kerry

He's just going to call her a cheater and that'll be that

Some Guy TT posted:

reminder that this isnt a discussion thread if youre looking for resources that arent here please ask for them in another thread and then quote them here


this thread has mentioned trump eating warren alive before but this is a good specific example for people who counter with oh but she already did the dna test its all in the past now

Josef bugman posted:

I found this post online and I kind of like it as a way of underlining my own views, but I don't want to intuit it as gospel, so what do you folks think?

https://twitter.com/glowybones/status/1174925707476008960