AlanS

Only because people don't. If that is your attitude you pretty much deserve what you have. Seriously, democracy only works when people participate. Idealistic? Democracy itself is idealistic. You are missing the point. How elections are done matters. The current primary system with a two party system creates polarization, instead of consensus. What I would like to see is a reform of how the primaries are done with an eye of finding more middle of the road candidates. The two parties filled with ideologues, create election rules that the benefit the unrealistic extremes on left and right to the detriment of the pragmatic middle. This the one thing the extremist on both the left and right agree on. We need primary election reforms. This is a video about the ranked preference voting system. I'd like to see a variation of this a national presidential primary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoAnYQZrNrQ

An entire thread about what trucks we own, but not one comment about the victims. https://www.yahoo.com/news/victims-manhattan-bike-path-attack-slideshow-wp-212727126.html Many of them were friends from Argentina biking together. One from Belgium was a mother of a young child. This terrorist seems quite proud of what he did. I hope NY state has the death penalty, and they can get on with justice quickly. No point in keeping this guy around. We are entering a new phase. Now that ISIS is all be defeated in Iraq and Syria. Many of the ISIS fighters are slipping away from the battlefield. And those people that left Europe, Russia and the US to fight for ISIS will try to slip back in. One thing to consider, Syria had lots of weapons including MANPADs, which are shoulder launched surface to air missiles. One fortunate flaw of these weapons is the batteries die after a short period, and as a result even though ISIS had stolen lots of them, they couldn't really use them. But recently ISIS figured out how to make a crude home-made battery to activate these weapons. A concern is they will smuggle them back into Europe and figure out how to re-create that home-made battery to activate those weapons. Even if just a few succeed, we will be wishing for the day when they were just using trucks.

Vote for what? If you run at a national level in either party you are expected to confirm or else you are kicked out. This article shows clearly how things are skewed. Even in the few states that don't require membership to vote you can only pick one. This is fundamentally flawed. IMHO. I'd like to see a presidential primary system where you can have ranked voting, so you can pick multiple people from either party, and then entire nation votes on the same day. If you like 2 from the democrats and 3 from the republicans that is who you vote for. You vote nationally in three rounds. In round 1 you eliminate the bottom half. Round 2 maybe leave just the top 3. Round 3 just top two. In that system, neither Trump nor Clinton survive.

Our presidential primary system sucks, and so does the two party system. I think people should be forced to run as individuals, and then they can explain the logic behind their positions. The two party system just generated polarization, as can very much be seen here. More than half of all voters are independents and they don't get any say in the system, so many elections are determined in the primary (which only party members can vote in) thanks to gerrymandering etc. http://www.independentvoterproject.org/ This is a project to decrease the influence of the two party system. Watch the video in the Reform Efforts section.

Now that ISIS's caliphate is dead in Mosel and Raqqa. They will likely now revert back underground and into a terrorist organization, and what happened today will be uncomfortably normal. This is a Frontline documentary of the Iraqi Special Forces soldiers fighting the battle in Mosel and killing these terrorist before then can make there way here. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/mosul/

If you are in a college dorm, don't you have access to the college cafeteria? Instead, why not move out of the dorms as soon as possible and just refain until then. It will give you something to look forward too. I doubt it would bother me if I were there, but I've run into passive-aggressive types in college, and this could be interpreted by some as that kind of behavior.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/putins-revenge/ This is the bigger issues. It will remain after Trump is gone.

This thread is about Russia, yes? Trump will be gone in a few years, and Putin will remain. Yes this is about Russia.

Frontline shows are always worth watching. This is required watching. For anyone concerned about how Russia tried to undermine American (and Western democracy). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/watch-the-election-clash-that-fueled-putins-ire-against-clinton/ Hopefully someday. Russia is a free country in a post Putin era, but in the mean time this Mafia like country is what we will need to deal with. Every voter needs to understand the tactics Putin used to undermine our election.

Above is the only sentence of the article you need to read. I say putting our political class in charge of our tech industry is a cure worse than the disease. Anyone lamenting the fact that Google is the only search engine is forgetting that other search engines once existed and Google won the search engine wars for a reason. Does the author of this article not recall the names: Infoseek, Lycos., altaVista, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, Oveture, AllTheWeb? Do you really want to go back to using those search engines? If you don't like our choice now, spend some time now thinking about if you want to use Lyft, Uber, Easy Taxi, or just get on your phone and call a taxi. The choice you make now will determine the options you have in the future. Be a smart consumer.

And this looks like a quick way to restore some power to remote region. Roll-out solar panel. Advantage here, is diesel generators need a constant supply of fuel, and it might not make out to lower priority areas. https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/roll-solar-panels-may-be-game-changer-disaster-relief-ncna808111

This from PBS News Hour. Puerto Ricos Power Struggles predate Hurricane Maria http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/puerto-ricos-power-struggles-predate-hurricane-maria/ http://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/3005457804/

Agree. It is isn't just Puerto Rico that would benefit from decentralized power distribution. California and the entire US would too. It seems that many utility companies are getting in the way of that.

I don't have a link for this at the moment, but both the Yahoo and Equifax breaches are the work of Russia's intelligence agencies. Those were not just some random group of hackers. In the U.S. we need to put a lot more effort into defensive security measures. Anyone that still has Kaspersky software should disable it, and always use an MFA in addition to a good password with important accounts.

So do you think she is a racists trying to silence black athletes' First Amendment rights?

This is what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks of the national anthem protesters. https://www.yahoo.com/news/ginsburg-calls-kaepernick-anthem-protest-151929071.html

Iago, since you were on the island during the storm and know that area, your posts in the forum carry more weight with me that those who were not on the island. Thanks for posting.

The Kurdish people in the middle-east span 4 nations - Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran - are the largest ethnic group without their own country. Should they be allowed to have their own nation? Here is a PBS News Hour video about the Kurdish YPJ in Syria. Kurds in Iraq are about to have a referendum on independence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEw5FQaK0pI

I agree that comment wasn't called for. I apologize for the snowflake comment. People need to keep things in perspective and reserve the word evil, for true evil.

Trump isn't even close. If you want to talk about true evil, focus on ISIS and the Kim dynasty of North Korea ISIS beheads anyone that isn't in agreement with their ideology. When ever they got hold of chemical weapons they have used them. They celebrated when a brain-washed teenage boy detonated a bomb at a concert full of teenagers. Totally deranged. They are right now in Yemen having their best college educated chemist creating device to sneak bombs past x-ray machines and might in next few years create and distribute these bombs to their followers. If they go hold of a nuclear bomb it is going off in the middle of the nearest western city they can transport it too. Kim Jun-un killed his mentor and uncle with anti-aircraft guns. Used VX nerve agent the most toxic chemical weapon ever created to kill his own brother in the middle of a busy airport where it could have killed many more. He had killed people within his cliche for offenses as simple as falling asleep during a meeting, or simply speaking the truth instead of spewing out the sycophantic non-sense. In the 90s the Kim dynasty let a famine kill 20% of its populate, and the rest eat bark and grass while the ruling family dinned on the best imported caviar in the world. North Korea runs the most brutal internment camps that still currently exist in the world Read this book if you are curious. https://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0143122916 North Korea now has nuclear weapons and might be able to make them small enough to fit on a missile with the range to hit Seattle. If they launch it today it is a 50/50 chance of us stopping it. Those are the true evils we face in this world. Trump. Really? Not even close. Stop being a bunch of snowflakes.

I wonder if American Pragmatism, the thing that once made us a great and exceptional country is withering away and dying. It still lives in some place in this country, but in Washington DC and in our political debates it is all but dead.

18 years old. It wasn't even my idea to go. It was the summer after a year on college, and I told my school classmate/lab co-worker I recently turned 18. "He said you can now legally skydive. Want to go?" The words "Sure, Let's go" escaped from my mouth before my brain could stop them. I did 36 jumps while in college, the got married and took a long break from skydiving.

This is an interesting question. One way to address is it have all 100 plus some many backups spend an entire year working together in an isolated and harsh environment like Antartica. Many people will realize quickly that they aren't cut out for it and leave voluntarily. A few who can't get along with others people would need to be cut. The remaining will have time to train for this skills they will need and have a year to practice them. It would take a certain kind of person to do something like this. People with a lot of grit and determination. People like skydivers. There is an excellent science fiction book series about this called: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. The author Kim Stanley Robinson lives in Davis, California. If you haven't read the book I recommend it.

Here is an article... about Russian assassinations outside of Russia. http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-assassination-abroad-2017-6

Potential challenger in Russian election jailed. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/alexei-navalny-organizes-anti-corruption-protests-russia-day-n770886 Why do the Russian people put up with this? http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-bribe-jumps-75-percent-anti-corruption-tsar-tells-newspaper-n734246