Phil1111

No apologies necessary. I was sort of replying to Turtles post supporting vouchers. But i don't like debating with him for obvious reasons. IMO good schools are the best way to lift poor people from a economic malaise. It is for certain the most effective way for countries to increase overall productivity, GDP, reduce unemployment, etc.

I suppose but DeVos: Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America’s Schools to Build “God’s Kingdom” Betsy DeVos: the billionaire Republican destroying public education A sobering look at what Betsy DeVos did to education in Michigan — and what she might do as secretary of education

Fast forward ten years. China, Iran Approach Major Accord Amid Deteriorating US-China Relations "Beijing is reported to be in the final stages of approving a $400 billion economic and security deal with Tehran, which some analysts say could give China a vast and secure source of energy and a strategic foothold in the Gulf. Iran’s foreign ministry has confirmed that the potential agreement includes significant infrastructure investments and closer cooperation on defense and intelligence sharing. It’s also rumored to include discounts for Iranian oil. The deal is the latest step in Beijing’s attempt to expand from a regional hegemony to a world power via its Belt and Road Initiative." That should provide the military might to protect its recently bombed centrifuges. The needed cash to reinvigorate its nuclear program. The shield of China to keep tankers pouring cheap oil into China. The US’s demand to extend the arms embargo against Iran, due to expire in four months, has been rejected by the members of the United Nation Security Council (UNSC) including China and Russia. "The other permanent members of the UNSC – the UK and France – also failed to support the extension of the embargo against Iran. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that lifting the ban on the trade of conventional weapons would turn Iran into a “rogue weapons dealer,” supplying advanced weapons to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and fueling conflicts in Venezuela, Syria and Afghanistan." So how did trump's "great negotiating" , "maximum pressure" all turn out?

Agree. I accept your idea that teachers use kids to negotiate a better compensation agreement. But in general they are not highly paid. Competition needs to come from testing both on the teacher and the student. Not at the source of funding because property taxes acts to keep poor areas with underfunded schools. Why America's Schools Have A Money Problem. A excellent graphic portrait of under-funding in US schools. Betsy DeVos is a idiot and charter schools are a recipe for failure in poor geographic areas.

Within the conservative, nationalist movement there is in addition a perceived threat from women. They want the same pay as men. Want to take away traditional jobs from men. They want to challenge men in positions of power. Some even think they can have families w/o a husband. A GOP heresy, a nightmare.

When ascertaining where the thinking of certain trump supporters comes from. Its usually FOX. Certain SC posters love and worship FOX broadcasters. Anytime I criticize FOX its as if I attacked their mother. On the right sources of thinking are fiercely protected so its useful sometimes to get the lies right from the source.Think teat of a cow.

“What this lawsuit reveals is that today’s Fox News is the same old Fox News,” said attorney Douglas Wigdor in announcing the lawsuit’s filing. “Some of the names in leadership may have changed since Roger Ailes’ regime, but Fox News’ institutional apathy towards sexual misconduct has not.” No wonder its trump's favorite channel. All the players getting a piece of the action, no pun intended.

Hold that thought: Trump Refuses To Commit To Accepting Election Results from July 19,2020

Nat Gas is good.

People his age have better things to do with their time. He saw a wrong and went to address it. I view him like the other elderly man who ended up with the broken skull.Like the Russians that are protesting against Putin. The federal officer is probably a good guy but people can easily be lead astray. I'd bet a hour with David would have the officer convinced he needs to respect the constitution not numnuts orders.

Private bone spurs orders the beating of 53 yo USN veteran. Chickenhawks with Barr nodding approval are reenacting the Beer Hall Putsch. A Navy Veteran Had a Question for the Feds in Portland. They Beat Him in Response. The veteran said he wanted to ask the officers whether they felt their actions violated the Constitution. Video shows them tear-gassing him and smashing his hand with baton blows. "Christopher J. David had largely ignored the protests in downtown Portland, Ore., but when he saw videos of unidentified federal agents grabbing protesters off the street and throwing them into rented minivans, he felt compelled to act. Mr. David, a Navy veteran, said that federal agents’ use of violent tactics against protesters, without the support of the mayor, the governor or local law enforcement, was a violation of the oaths that agents take to support, uphold and defend the Constitution. And so, on Saturday, he took a bus downtown to ask the officers how they squared their actions with that oath. Instead of getting an answer, Mr. David was beaten with a baton by one federal officer as another doused him with pepper spray, according to video footage of the encounter. After he walked away from the confrontation, Mr. David was taken to a nearby hospital, where a specialist said his right hand was broken and would require surgery to install pins, screws and plates. He declined pain medication." Hero.

John Kasich knows how to read.

How It Starts SHTF.

If you happened to watch the FOX interview of trump on the weekend you'd see that even that demographic isn't watching him anymore.Trump's Fox News interview, in 4 minutes Evidently trump didn't learn the first go around so he's going to try some more: Trump says he will resume holding White House coronavirus press briefings as cases rise So 80 minute long events with lies, partisan attacks, more Clorox injection ideas, etc. All designed to appeal to his evangelical, confederate flag waving, "independent" base....yeah!

U.S. coal production during the first quarter of 2020 totaled 149.1 million short tons (MMst), which was 9.8% lower than the previous quarter and 17% lower than the first quarter of 2019. So four years till zero US coal production. Or with a Biden victory two quarters. Sorry Brent.

So the federal government picking up the costs to cleanup old wells and storage areas of bankrupt oil companies is good news. So the widows and orphans who loose life savings on the equity and bond losses is good news. So the payouts to the CEO's who wrote big bonuses into their severance parachutes is good news. Got it.

A new book has come out. Not about trump but instead Putin. ‘Putin’s People’ Documents the Ruthless and Relentless Reach of Kremlin Corruption What is most interesting are the parallels on how the GOP, big business, trump and those who trade favors with trump reward each other. That would be Mr. Murdoch of FOX, the Koch brothers and others. How conspiracy theories, misinformation, legal threats, etc. lead to the last paragraph of this story, highlighted. Its like trump's continued messaging about Biden and Ukraine. All designed to confuse those who can't be bothered to delve into the issues. "In the years that it took the journalist Catherine Belton to research and write “Putin’s People,” her voluminous yet elegant account of money and power in the Kremlin, a number of her interview subjects tried various tactics to undermine her work. One of them, “a close Putin ally” apparently alarmed by her questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s activities as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden in the 1980s, emphatically insisted that any rumored links between the K.G.B. and terrorist organizations had never been proved: “And you should not try to do so!” he warned. Another source, defending Putin’s tenure as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, took a cooler approach. Asked about a local politician named Marina Salye who found evidence of corruption in the so-called oil-for-food scheme that Putin oversaw in the early ’90s, he didn’t bother to deny her findings; he just rejected the very idea that her findings mattered. “This all happened,” he smugly acknowledged. “But this is absolutely normal trading operations. How can you explain this to a menopausal woman like that?” Belton suggests that this is the kind of two-pronged strategy the Kremlin has used to pursue its interests at home and abroad: Deploy threats, disinformation and violence to prevent damaging secrets from getting out, or resort to a chilling cynicism that derides everything as meaningless anyway. The dauntless Belton, currently an investigative reporter for Reuters who previously served as the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, allowed neither approach to deter her, talking to figures with disparate interests on all sides, tracking down documents, following the money. The result is a meticulously assembled portrait of Putin’s circle, and of the emergence of what she calls “K.G.B. capitalism” — a form of ruthless wealth accumulation designed to serve the interests of a Russian state that she calls “relentless in its reach.” As central as Putin is to the narrative, he mostly appears as a shadowy figure — not particularly creative or charismatic, but cannily able, like the K.G.B. agent he once was, to mirror people’s expectations back to them. The people who facilitated Putin’s rise didn’t do so for particularly idealistic reasons. An ailing Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs who thrived in the chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union were looking for someone who would preserve their wealth and protect them from corruption charges. Putin presented himself as someone who would honor the bargain, but then replaced any Yeltsin-era players who dared to challenge his tightening grip on power with loyalists he could call his own. “Putin’s People” tells the story of a number of figures who eventually ran afoul of the president’s regime. Media moguls like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were stripped of their empires and fled the country. Belton says the real turning point was the 2004 trial that sent Mikhail Khodorkovsky — at one point Russia’s richest man, with a controlling stake in the oil producer Yukos — to a Siberian prison camp for 10 years. Putin has since presided over the country and its resources like a czar, Belton writes, bolstered by a cadre of friendly oligarchs and secret service agents. Russia’s legal system was turned into a weapon and a fig leaf. Putin allowed and even encouraged the oligarchs to accrue vast personal fortunes, but they were also expected to siphon some money from their business ventures into the obschak, a collective kitty whose slush funds, Belton says, have been useful in projecting the image of a powerful Russia on the world stage. The Kremlin’s abiding definition of power was cramped and zero-sum; the resources were plowed into undermining other countries on the relative cheap, by funding troll farms, election meddling and extremist movements. It was an old K.G.B. model adapted for the new era, with Putin pursuing a nationalist agenda that embraced the country’s pre-revolutionary imperial past. Putin’s people had even figured out a way to turn London’s High Court into a tool for their own interests, freezing the assets of rival oligarchs while British lawyers took fat fees from both sides. As much as the West has been a target for the Kremlin’s “active measures,” Belton argues that the West has also been complacent and even complicit. The complacency has taken the form of a blithe belief in the power of globalization and liberal democracy, a persistent faith that once Russia opened itself up to international capital and ideas, it would never look back. But more mercenary motives were at play, too. Western business interests recognized how much profit could be made off of Russian oil behemoths and the giant sums of money sloshing around. (Unsurprisingly, Deutsche Bank — an institution at the center of many scandals — has occupied a crucial role.) Even when Putin was the beneficiary of such arrangements, he was contemptuous of them; his ability to use Western companies to Russia’s advantage only confirmed his long-held view “that anyone in the West could be bought.” “Putin’s People” ends with a chapter on Donald Trump, and what Belton calls the “network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized-crime associates” that has encircled him since the early ’90s. The fact that Trump was frequently overwhelmed by debt provided an opportunity to those who had the cash he desperately needed. Belton documents how the network used high-end real estate deals to launder money while evading stricter banking regulations after 9/11. She’s agnostic on whether Trump was a witting accomplice who was aware of how he was being used. As one former executive from the Trump Organization put it, “Donald doesn’t do due diligence.” But Belton does. And while the president may not read much — neglecting even those intelligence briefings about Russian bounty payments to Taliban militants — there are presumably any number of people in the White House and his party who do. Still, to read this book is to wonder whether a cynicism has embedded itself so deeply into the Anglo-American political classes that even the incriminating information it documents won’t make an actionable difference. A person familiar with Russia’s billionaires told Belton that once corrosion sets in, it’s devilishly hard to reverse: “They always have three or four different stories, and then it all just gets lost in the noise.”

Looks quite trumpish. What point are you trying to make? Sometimes i think both you and a couple others just like to stir the pot, or.......

Bravo to you and Wendy.

Pooled testing of covid in the US has been the latest hope for addressing the spread. Its too late. It has spread so much, there are so many positive cases and the delays in results for identifying active cases in a "pooled result". Make that a non starter in most areas. Just trump being trump, MAGA.

Its a good thing trump hasn't been successful with his southern border wall. Majority of Canadians polled want U.S. border closed until end of 2020: Ipsos. "The countries agreed to extend the ban on non-essential travel between the two until late August." "So far, Mexican officials have not actively pushed to fully reopen the border, multiple sources familiar with the discussions say. The perception in Mexico has been that it’s the U.S. that could send more cases to Mexico given the millions of confirmed cases in the United States."

This Christian? "The Inquisition, in historical ecclesiastical parlance also referred to as the "Holy Inquisition", was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy. The Inquisition started in 12th-century France to combat religious dissent, in particular the Cathars and the Waldensians. Other groups investigated later included the Spiritual Franciscans, the Hussites (followers of Jan Hus) and the Beguines. Beginning in the 1250s, inquisitors were generally chosen from members of the Dominican Order, replacing the earlier practice of using local clergy as judges.[1] The term Medieval Inquisition covers these courts up to the mid-15th century. " This Christian? An American Secret: The Untold Story Of Native American Enslavement This Christian? Catholic Church and slavery Of course I could go on and on about how Christians and "white protestants" wish to define themselves. To re-write history. At least Germany has the discipline and integrity to recognize its past historical mistakes. Want to send some trump supporting white evangelical/protestant supporters up the wall? Mention reparations.

Two great ones I just can't decide which one is better! President Trump's 2019 By The Numbers | NowThis Wall.by The Lincoln Project.

Although that is true and on target. The current GOP has said nothing about the trump camoshirts. The GOP obstructed the impeachment and voted against it.

What sort of reversal were you talking about? "The Trump administration has balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and shore up federal health agencies as the virus surges across the country,... But in talks over the weekend, administration officials instead pushed to zero out the funding for testing and for the nation’s top health agencies," The trump Death Clock is going to be spinning like the "Wheel of Unfortunate". Those wealthy enough to self isolate and have insurance and those who can't. More testing equals defeat for incumbents.If testing is zero the crisis is over.