Phil1111

Just goes to show how corrosive power is. Corrosive to ethics, ego, judgement and who is the modest minded president again?

I agree, but rescheduling at short time intervals for flight crews happens more often than some think. I think the actions of the man screaming like a stuck pig and being dragged down the isle in rigor strikes me as equally indefensible. The policy at United is to keep upping the offer till a taker comes forward. Furthermore pilots have huge discretion for anything that occurs on-board their aircraft. I think this was actually a Republic Airlines flight. There is a bit of debate as to whether the passenger was "boarded" or not. But under the contract and law. The passenger..er.."guest" can be removed at any time. Although presumably not while in flight. In defense of the flight crew this may have been entirely the actions of the United gate agents.There is a jumpseat, was it already occupied by the last minute crew? Delta has offered $1500 or more to free up seats(plus acc.). United has issued a statement that they offered $1000 at the gate. But according to a passenger interview he heard only $800 in the AC. In a couple weeks this will all settle down. The quants at UAL will provide new analysis that an additional .03% overbook on routes 372 and 692, etc. will add $34,000 more to the bottom line on a monthly basis. The COO will rubber stamp the plan. Because as everyone knows. Quants run airlines.

A perfect example of why I prefer to drive in almost any circumstance. I'd refer to the psychology experiments where rats are confined in small spaces until they always start fighting with each other. Then ultimately kill each other. Another reason why passengers can't have guns on flights.

Its not real money but can be used on future United flights. IMO the first mistake was allowing the passengers to board. Usually those auctions take place in the waiting lounge and someone always takes it. The idiot United employees who needed to get on the flight must have been late to the gate. The pilot/crew should have offered more United dollars. It was the statement of another passenger that they only offered $800. "If your delay is more than two hours or if the airline doesn't make alternate travel arrangements for you, your compensation doubles again If the airline doesn't rebook you or books you on another flight that gets in to your domestic destination two hours after your original arrival time (four hours for international destinations), you are entitled to 400% of your one-way fare, up to $1,300." http://www.businessinsider.com/what-youre-entitled-to-if-you-get-bumped-off-a-flight-2015-6 The cops that removed the passenger were real cops. So the flight crew asked the passenger to leave and under the law thats a lawful order. Then the cops asked him to leave and trespassed him. He refused again, resisted the cops and started a fight with them in the cabin. Be it Alec Baldwin, or the "nut rage" incident: "A former Korean Air vice president was sentenced to one year in prison on Thursday for ordering a plane in New York to return to its gate after becoming furious over how her macadamia nuts were served. Heather Cho, who also goes by her Korean name of Cho Hyun-ah, ordered the Dec. 5 Seoul-bound flight at John F. Kennedy International Airport to let off the flight’s purser, whom she said had served her macadamia nuts in a sealed package instead of on a plate. Cho was seated in first class and argued that serving the nuts in their package was a violation of company service practices." I would throw the book at this idiot for fighting with the cops. Everyone is blaming United and they have some blame. The pilot should have authorized $1300 United cash and then $1500 actual cash. But after the cops are in the equation its their purview. What if that idiots fight had injured another passenger? A cabin is not the place to fight with the cops. The cops should have been able to use better persuasion. But in the end LE typically doesn't say to someone who refuses a lawful order that they will just forget it.Then leave. Alec Baldwin: http://blogs.findlaw.com/celebrity_justice/2011/12/alec-baldwin-american-airlines-in-war-over-words-with-friends-on-plane.html Nut rage http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-south-korea-nut-rage-case-20150212-story.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVUkeBUiXoE At 46 seconds story starts on the headline of a Moscow newspaper: "We Believed in You Comrade Donald trump" The Donald disappointing voters, people and women all over the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STJQnu72Nec After being forcefully removed he returned to the AC. Stupid people, passengers and airline personnel. Two hour delay. Pilot gives passenger trespass warning. Passenger doesn't leave. Get police. No passengers want to leave, offer two flights. No results three flights, then four flights. Probably a good idea not to overboard the aircraft. Apart from assault, a passenger who gets in the way of a crewmember's ability to perform his or her job can be fined by the Federal Aviation Administration or even prosecuted on criminal charges, depending on the severity of the interference. Flight crew interference incidents can result in up to 20 years' imprisonment and fines of up to $250,000, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Potential Civil Consequences Acts of interference that don't quite rise to the level of criminal conduct can still warrant hefty fines by the FAA. In fact, the FAA can propose up to $25,000 per violation for unruly passenger cases. One incident can result in multiple violations, according to the FAA's website. http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2013/11/what-happens-if-you-disobey-a-flight-attendant.html

So someone should ask him how stable the these countries are since we helped oust the old regimes: - Afghanistan - Iraq - Libya The US; Doing the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result. The problem arises with IS, Al Qaeda, Taliban and other radical Islamic groups. Until this temporary Islamic radicalism runs its course and is exhausted. These groups should be denied safe countries and safe areas of countries to operate from.Because they will train, bomb and destabilize any weak governments around their area of operation. Its stupid for the US to do everything. But it takes leadership to put co-coalitions together together to "build states". Leadership which is absent now. France should be the leader in Libya with Egypt and Algeria assisting. If leadership steps aside then countries like Iran will do their best to cause trouble. With Russian assistance of course.

He probably got reassigned to influence the French election. Too funny, thats along the lines of what I was thinking. French, German elections. They just suffered heavy casualties in the programming dept: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39553250. Then all the TR and Russian bots need reprogramming because trump has betrayed President Putin. Such turmoil. He'll be lucky to even have time for a bowl of borsch.

Spanish police have arrested a Russian programmer for alleged involvement in "hacking" the US election, Spanish press reports have said. Pyotr Levashov, arrested on 7 April in Barcelona, has now been remanded in custody. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39553250 If he was smart he would ASK for extradition before Mr. Putin's friends get ahold of him.

60 Minutes on CBS had a good story on US immigration on Sunday. They mentioned the efforts that Brightbart used to attack an American business. All because the owner was a immigrant and Muslim. Breitbart and Donald Trump’s alt-right troll brigade attacked Chobani yogurt because its founder likes immigrants Death threats have been coming in from alt-righters believing Chobani yogurt wants to “drown the U.S. in Muslims" The yogurt company Chobani has in the past made news for really great reasons: Six weeks of paid parental leave for every employee, as well as shares worth up to 10 percent of the company for full-timers if and when the company goes public. But in recent months, the New York-based company has come under much more negative scrutiny from right-wing media outlets — leading to death threats for the company’s founder. Mobilized by the anti-immigration rhetoric that has propelled the presidential campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump, alt-right trolls have targeted Chobani for daring to hire resettled refugees in the midst of what the United Nations has called the largest refugee crisis since World War II. The New York Times’ David Gelles reported that 300 of the yogurt company’s 2,000 full-time employees are refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and other countries. Chobani’s founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent, now faces death threats for employing immigrants in his New York and Twin Falls, Idaho, factories. In a January opinion piece for CNN Money, Ulukaya wrote about his advocacy efforts like creating the Tent foundation, an organization that aims to help the more than 65 million people who have fled armed conflict or persecution and now are displaced around the world, to motivate the private sector to help end the refugee crisis: The Tent Pledge asks companies all over the world to step up and do more. We’re asking them to provide refugees with job training, employment opportunities, and the kind of direct assistance that experts have identified as a priority — everything from blankets and water, to debit cards and Internet access. Shortly after the op-ed was published, the far-right website World Net Daily published a story titled, “American Yogurt Tycoon Vows to Choke U.S. With Muslims.” (The title has since been changed.) But Ulukaya’s column never mentioned Muslims. Ulukaya’s profile amongst right-wing hatemongers only exploded after he followed-up his column with an appearance at the Davos economic forum in January where he called on multinational corporations to hire more refugees. “The minute a refugee has a job, that’s the minute they stop being a refugee,” he told the global business leaders. And after the world’s largest yogurt factory announced plans to expand with a $100 million research and development center in the center of a small Idaho town earlier this year, the company attracted the attention of Breitbart, the right-wing website whose former executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon is now running Trump’s presidential campaign. Idaho happens to be one of the five highest refugee-absorbing states per capita, due to its low cost of living and 3.9 percent unemployment rate, according to the Daily Beast. The state has welcomed about 30,000 refugees from more than 50 countries since the 1970s. And like he did with his New York factory, Ulukaya relied on a local refugee resettlement center to find new hires for his Idaho plant. The coverage from Breitbart attempted to smear the company with annual yogurt sales of about $1.5 billion as a menace to society and scourge on the local community. One Breitbart story suggested that Chobani’s hiring of refugees caused Idaho’s rise in tuberculosis with the headline, “TB spiked 500 percent in Twin Falls during 2012, as Chobani Yogurt Opened Plant.” Another titled “Twin Falls refugee rape special report: why are the refugees moving in,” attempted to link the company’s hiring of refugees with two sexual assault cases in the Idaho town. And a third article claimed Chobani has “deep ties” to a pro-Clinton advocacy group that imposed the refugee crisis in Twin Falls. In August, a white nationalist organization that endorsed Trump for president issued robocalls across Idaho claiming that the “nonwhite invasion of their state and all white areas constitutes white genocide.” As a result of Breitbart’s fearmongering, Shawn Barigar– the mayor of Twin Falls– and Ulukaya found themselves on the receiving end of racist epithets and death threats, the Times reported. “It got woven into a narrative that it’s all a cover-up, that we’re all trying to keep the refugees safe so that Chobani has its work force, that I personally am getting money from the Obama administration to help Chobani hire whoever they want, that it’s part of this Islamification of the United States,” Barigar told the Times. “It’s crazy.” According to Business Insider’s analysis of the hashtag “boycott Chobani” on Twitter, many of the threats are coming from supporters of Trump: https://twitter.com/ThomasSickler/status/772951206079725568 Breitbart editor-in-chief, Alex Marlow, defended the website’s coverage of Chobani. “Mr. Ulukaya hasn’t merely involved himself in this issue, he’s been one of the leaders in expanding refugee resettlement in the United States. Breitbart’s explosive growth is due in large measure to the mainstream media’s refusal to cover vital topics like this one,” Marlow said in a statement. Despite Trump’s army of alt-right trolls, however, Ulukaya stands as a perfect rebuke to those who want to scare the United States into shutting its doors to immigrants. “He’s the xenophobe’s nightmare,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told the Times. “Here’s an immigrant who isn’t competing for jobs, but is creating jobs big time. It runs completely counter to the far-right narrative.” http://www.salon.com/2016/11/03/breitbart-and-donald-trumps-alt-right-troll-brigade-attacked-chobani-yogurt-because-its-founder-likes-immigrants/ Two stories on the company the first a short 60 minutes one that mentions the threats and the second where the founder gave 10% of the company to employees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyHVLq-KtFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m01zagmwB68

There are two websites that offer objective views on Syria, the war and refugees. 1. IamSyria, started by "Professor David Crane was appointed a professor of practice at Syracuse University College of Law in the summer of 2006. Prior to that time he was a distinguished visiting professor for the 2005 academic year. From 2002-2005 he was the founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, an international war crimes tribunal, appointed to that position by the Secretary General of the United Nations, http://www.iamsyria.org/about-us.html 2. Syria Deeply founded by a Canadian woman from Montreal who was on CNN, Fareed Zakaria, GPS today. https://www.newsdeeply.com/syria IamSyria reported the death toll for March: - Government forces: 417 - Russian forces: 224 - ISIS: 129 - Armed opposition factions: 14 - International Coalition forces: 260 - Other Parties: 84 - Kurdish Forces: 11 Which illustrates Putin's involvement in the war. Naturally RT (Russian Television)doesn't report those figures. http://www.iamsyria.org/death-tolls.html

A military SAM system fared well against a civilian airliner? What point are you trying to make here? That killing civilians in commercial jetliners or on the ground in a hospital, a school ground, nursery,etc. is what Putin knows best? 2014 – Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a Boeing 777, crashes near the border of Ukraine and Russia after being shot down. All 298 people on board are killed.

Thats good news for the US. "In the first six months of this year, nearly 50 Bcf of U.S. LNG was exported. We will be surging to a dominant role in less than five years, with five terminals operating on the Gulf Coast and in Maryland by 2020. U.S. LNG has already been shipped to the Middle East, Europe, South America, Asia, and perhaps could soon reach the most energy-deprived region on Earth, where a tragic 650 million humans have no electricity whatsoever: "Sub-Saharan Africa May Help Soak Up Global LNG Glut." https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/09/11/good-news-for-u-s-liquefied-natural-gas-exports/#2f832568b6e2 Six US LNG export terminals are being built, with four along the Gulf coast and two along the Atlantic seaboard. If they are completed as planned, the six facilities would have combined peak capacity of 75mn t/yr, nearing Qatari output of 77mn t/yr. http://www.oilandgas360.com/u-s-lng-exports-surge-3-bcfday-2017/ The net, net of this.....Fu#k Putin.

Well for trump supporters this article may suggest what they have been pounding the table about for a decade. Chinese subsidies are killing American jobs. But the trump, Xi Jinping lovefest this weekend just threw those ideas under the bus. The transactional President will protect China, if China plays ball on N. Korea. It suggests forces that will change the green energy industry and others in the next couple decades. Five gigawatts supplies a city of about a million with electricity. When Solar Panels Became Job Killers WUHAN, China — Russell Abney raised two children on solar power. The 49-year-old Georgia Tech graduate worked for the last decade in Perrysburg, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, pulling a good salary as an equipment engineer for the largest American solar-panel maker. On the other side of the world, Gao Song boasted his own solar success story. A former organic fruit retailer who lives in the dusty Chinese city of Wuhan, he installed solar panels on his roof four years ago and found it so lucrative that he went into business installing them for others. By last summer, he and a team of 50 employees were installing solar-panel systems on nearly 100 roofs a month. Then China shook the global solar business — and transformed both their lives. “A small vibration back in China,” said Frank Haugwitz, a longtime solar industry consultant in Beijing, “can cause an avalanche in prices around the world.” Late last summer, Chinese officials began publicly toying with slashing the subsidies they offer domestic solar-panel buyers. Mr. Gao’s business dried up, and he laid off half his workers. “I have been working hard and was just off to a good start,” he said. “Now I have to start over." China’s solar-panel makers cut their prices by more than a quarter to compensate, sending global prices plummeting. Western companies found themselves unable to compete, and cut jobs from Germany to Michigan to Texas and points beyond. Those points included Perrysburg — where Mr. Abney and about 450 other employees suddenly found themselves out of work. “Within just a few months, it all came crashing down,” Mr. Abney said. “It’s like a death in the family. People feel awkward talking about it.” President Trump, who pressed President Xi Jinping of China on trade and other issues this week when they met at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., has vowed to end what he calls China’s unfair business practices. Much of his oratory has involved old-fashioned smokestack industries like steel — industries in which the jobs were already disappearing even before the rise of China. But economists and business groups warn that China’s industrial ambitions have entered a new, far-reaching phase. With its deep government pockets, growing technical sophistication and a comprehensive plan to free itself from dependence on foreign companies, China aims to become dominant in industries of the future like renewable energy, big data and self-driving cars. With solar, it has already happened. China is now home to two-thirds of the world’s solar-production capacity. The efficiency with which its products convert sunlight into electricity is increasingly close to that of panels made by American, German and South Korean companies. Because China also buys half of the world’s new solar panels, it now effectively controls the market. For much of the past century, the ups and downs of the American economy could spell the difference between employment or poverty for people like Chilean copper miners and Malaysian rubber farmers. Now China’s policy shifts and business decisions can have the same kind of global impact once wielded by power brokers in Washington, New York and Detroit. The story of China’s rise in solar panels illustrates the profound difficulties the country presents to Mr. Trump, or to any American president. Its size and fast-moving economy give it the ability to redefine industries almost on a dime. Its government-led pursuit of dominance in crucial industries presents a direct challenge to countries where leaders generally leave business decisions to the businesses themselves. Already, China is the world’s largest maker and buyer of steel, cars and smartphones. While it does not necessarily dominate those industries, its government ministries are moving to replicate that success with robots, chips and software — just as in solar. Chinese panel makers “have the capital, they have the technology, they have the scale,” said Ocean Yuan, the chief executive of Grape Solar, a distributor of solar panels based in Eugene, Ore. Of American rivals, he said, “they will crush them.” Rooted in Fish Before he became one of the solar industry’s most powerful players, Liu Hanyuan raised fish. The son of peasants from China’s hardscrabble southwest, Mr. Liu sold some of the family’s pigs in 1983 for what was then around $100 to buy some fish. Soon he went into the even more lucrative business of selling fish feed, and he eventually moved into pig feed and duck feed. The brand name, Keli, is a combination of the first and last Chinese characters from a famous paraphrasing of Karl Marx by Deng Xiaoping, the father of modern China: Science and technology are primary productive forces. According to Mr. Liu’s authorized biography, he faced local criticism at first for his early embrace of capitalism, and responded by saying that his fish feed was an improved product that followed Deng’s dictum. “When my business grows bigger,” he said at the time, “I will build another floor for labs.” Plans to shift into computer chips did not pan out, so by 2006, he shifted to solar technology, after taking control of a company that made chemicals for the production of polysilicon, the crystalline raw material for solar panels. That move proved fortunate: China was just then embarking on a concerted effort to become a solar-industry powerhouse. China has led the world in solar panel production. But recently, Chinese companies have been building factories outside China, particularly in Malaysia and Vietnam, to bypass anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures that the United States and European Union imposed on Chinese-made panels four years ago. Over the next six years, Beijing pushed state-owned banks to provide at least $18 billion in loans at low-interest rates to solar-panel manufacturers, and encouraged local governments to subsidize them with cheap land. China had more on its mind than just dominating solar exports: Its severe pollution problems and concerns that rising sea levels from climate change could devastate its teeming coastal cities lent urgency to efforts to develop green technology. At the same time, China also became a major player in wind power through similar policies. With ample assistance, China’s solar-power production capacity expanded more than tenfold from 2007 to 2012. Now six of the top 10 solar-panel makers are Chinese, including the top two, compared with none a decade ago. The solar division of Mr. Liu’s company, the Tongwei Group, which discloses few financial details, is one of the fastest-expanding players in the industry. That growth forced many American and European solar-panel manufacturers into a headlong retreat. Two dozen of them filed for bankruptcy or cut back operations during President Barack Obama’s first term, damaging the heady optimism then about clean energy. In 2012 and 2013, the United States and the European Union concluded that Chinese solar-panel makers were collecting government subsidies and dumping panels, or selling them for less than the cost of producing and shipping them. Both imposed import limits. Chinese manufacturers and officials denied improper subsidies and dumping, and still do. Several large Chinese manufacturers that had previously overexpanded and had been selling at heavy losses for years then closed their doors. But Western solar companies say Chinese banks still lent heavily to the survivors despite low loan-recovery rates from the defaults of big Chinese solar companies like Suntech, Chaori and LDK Solar. “The main subsidy is massive, below-market loans by Chinese state-owned commercial banks to finance new capacity and also the massive ongoing losses of Chinese companies,” said Jürgen Stein, the president of American operations for SolarWorld, a big German panel maker. Li Junfeng, a top architect of China’s renewable-energy policies until he retired from that responsibility in early January, said that the West had exaggerated the role of the state in helping to finance Chinese solar-panel manufacturers. “The market can decide for itself,” he said. “The good companies can get money, the bad companies cannot.” High-Tech Hopes Like the Chinese solar industry as a whole, Tongwei is thinking bigger. Mr. Liu’s company bought an enormous solar-panel manufacturing complex in central China in 2013 from LDK Solar, which had run into severe financial difficulties. Now it plans to build factories of five gigawatts apiece in the Chinese cities of Chengdu and Hefei. By comparison, the entire global market is only about 77 gigawatts each year, while world capacity is 139 gigawatts. At the same time, Mr. Liu is dismissive of companies in the West that pioneered many solar technologies but have lost their market shares to China. “They are very jealous,” he said, “and cannot catch up with China’s pace.” From an environmental standpoint, China’s solar push has been good for the world. Solar-panel prices have fallen close to 90 percent over the past decade. Many of the solar panels in America’s backyards and solar power plants are made by Chinese companies. But for the solar industry, Chinese expansion could mean an extended period of low prices and cutbacks for everybody else. “The solar industry is facing again, I would say, a new winter,” said Patrick Pouyanné, the chairman and chief executive of Total, the French oil and gas giant, which owns a controlling stake in SunPower, an American solar-panel maker. China now hopes to replicate its solar industry’s growth in other areas. Under a plan called Made in China 2025, China hopes to become largely self-sufficient within seven years in a long list of industries, including aircraft, high-speed trains, computer chips and robots. The plan echoes the solar-panel and wind-turbine buildup a decade ago, but with a larger checkbook. Made in China 2025 calls for roughly $300 billion in financial backing: inexpensive loans from state-owned banks, investment funds to acquire foreign technologies, and extensive research subsidies. If successful, Made in China 2025 would represent a fundamental shift in how China deals with the world. Initially, most of the industries that moved to China, such as shoe and clothing production, were already leaving the United States anyway. Heavy industries such as steel followed. While the shift was profound — some economists estimate that up to 2.4 million American jobs were lost to China from 1999 to 2011, though others dispute that analysis — China has struggled in some areas like autos to create viable global competitors. American and European business groups have warned that the China 2025 plan means that a much wider range of Western businesses will face the same kind of government-backed competition that has already transformed the solar industry. “The policies started in solar and are now starting to infect the higher reaches of the economy with Made in China 2025,” said Jeremie Waterman, the president of the China Center at the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Ripples From Wuhan In the end, China did not slash subsidies for rooftop solar panels, and cut them only slightly for large power-plant arrays. But prices barely rebounded from last year’s slump. Mr. Gao, of Wuhan, is a slender 37-year-old whose dark hair is already thinning. He said that his business had depended not on homeowners but on profit-minded investors who made use of the subsidies. The investors would pay three-fifths of the cost of a homeowner’s system. The homeowner would take only enough electricity from the panels to power the home. The investor would sell the rest of the electricity to the grid at a high, government-assisted price. The suggestion that the government might cut the subsidy, even though the government did not follow through on it, panicked his investors. So they stopped financing further deals. “They fear that the year after next, they may have nothing,” he said. He recently hired four more employees to drum up sales, even as installations creep along at a small fraction of demand a year ago. In Perrysburg, Mr. Abney lost his job at First Solar, the largest solar-panel manufacturer based in the United States, and looked in vain for a job in the auto industry in the Toledo area. He ended up taking a job three weeks ago at a building materials company in Lancaster, Pa. His daughter is going off to college in the autumn, while his wife and son, a high school freshman now, will follow him to central Pennsylvania this summer. “It’s hardest on him because we’re pulling him away from his high school and his activities,” Mr. Abney said. First Solar struggled with improving Chinese technology as well as dropping prices. It laid off workers in Perrysburg partly because it decided not to produce its Series 5 generation of panels, which represented a limited improvement over its existing Series 4 panels. First Solar, to better compete with Chinese producers, will wait for its lower-cost, high-efficiency Series 6 panels to be ready for production in 2018. In the end, First Solar, which is based in Tempe, Ariz., laid off 1,600 people worldwide. “It’s just kind of a shock factor when a lot of families realize they’re no longer going to have a job,” said Michael Olmstead, the Republican mayor of Perrysburg. Though Mr. Abney has started his new job at almost the same pay as his previous one, he says part of him pined for the days when the United States still led in solar energy, and when First Solar was at the forefront of that leadership. “They were good for us,” he said. “And it was great while it lasted.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/business/china-trade-solar-panels.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Oh, yeah! Just go take a look at Ann Coulters Twitter feed since then. OK... I did, THANKS "There are nearly 50k comments on this @BreitbartNews story about Syrian attack, 99% ferociously negative." I lump her in with bannon as detestable. If ever there was an idea you don't judge a book by its cover it would be her. Her display of intelligence, suggesting N. Korea nuke Seattle. Is only surpassed by a corrosive, ugly interior of hate. Mixed with zero compassion. A real prize.

Well it cost 76 million US. It delivered over 29 tons of explosive. It was a airbase with Russians on it. It was intended to send a political message. That US existing policy under Obama was over. It was delivered in a relatively short time frame from the gas attack. Without any substantive open dialog, posturing, etc. It confirms that trump is impulsive. lacks a coherent political end game, or objective. It probably pissed off his political base, of US first non-interventionist, anti-global thunkers!! Hurrah!!

I agree on the issues of expensive military entanglements an most of what you said. More than expense is the cost of lives. More and more I see the effectiveness of sanctions and other international collaborative efforts. Unfortunately as you state trump is an idiot, can't seem to grasp the ideas that allies and organizations like NATO, the EU, etc. can counter the morass of the UN. For trump the military and its capabilities can be a crutch for trump. Like a EO trump can give an order and off goes the missiles. Unlike trump Putin is very smart and very calculating. But he is not impulsive. Seldom reactionary. Because China and Russia have veto rights at the UN security council. Controlling Putin is impossible there. But with a little imagination his expansionist ideas on Ukraine, Syria and in E. Europe can be contained. Someone will need to lead trump on these issues. Kushner? I also agree with your "we are just fine with hundreds of thousands of people dying at the hands of conventional weapons, but not OK with nerve agents". Russia has been using white phosphorus cluster munitions. Which is a violation of treaty. But whats the real difference between children gassed and children slowly suffocated over a couple days under floors of collapsed concrete. In a hospital bombed by Syrian and Russian aircraft? Its very disconcerting in a way to see the idiot bannon shuffled to the sidelines and talk of Priebus having lessor influence. If they go, almost for certain trump will last four years. Finally, without sidetracking this tread too much. But dealing with the divisions of congress and the US government. There was a little nuclear war. Its odd that nuclear war was sidetracked by trump's actions on a little airbase in Syria. But thats how trump operates. Lindsay Graham is the person responsible for Neil McGill Gorsuch getting confirmed. Not like trump would give him credit for that. Graham organized the block of the Democrats SC nominee. A book entitled "The Future of Assisted Suicide" spells out whats in store for the US SC. The book was written by Gorsuch. In it, he writes about the absolute sanctity of life. Conservative lawyers are scouring the dockets now to find a case to reverse Roe v. Wade. Dems, meanwhile plot revenge. For certain US politics will see partisanship like never before.

Well: "Jared Kushner's family's company to make $400M in new sweetheart deal with Chinese firm" http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/15/14921720/kushner-conflict-interest-anbang That fell apart. Then he met with the Russian bankers to refinance a big existing obligation. Times are tough when you shop the four corners of the globe to roll over problem loans. But then you can just call "daddy" and wait for the next foreign entourage to visit Mar-a-Lago. Talk $400 million dollar loans before US vital interests are discussed.

Thats pretty funny. IMO the straight goods on foreign politics is when McCain and Graham stand together to make a statement. After all McCain was born in 1776 so he should have a good grasp on the issues.

Here it is: http://nano.tatamotors.com/price-list.php https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano Thats $3499 USD in New Delhi at retail. Now add say $1000 for self driving. Then it should be an ideal vehicle for elderly people that want to get around and cant get a drivers license.It currently gets 55 mpg and Tata Nano Diesel may get as much as 70 miles per gallon. Probably safer than a crotch rocket.

Absolutely correct. I knew it was only a matter of time that we would agree on something. Good morning. But the effects of global warming is increased variability and extremes in weather. Anytime there is mention of records, of 100 year rainfall, 200 year heat, 500 year flooding. Of records in weather extremes. Its global warming and the mention of records being broke get mentioned more and more.

"We are seeing similar warning signals as in 2011 when more than 260,000 people died during the famine in Somalia," said Karl-Otto Zentel, secretary general of the relief organization CARE (Germany-Luxemburg). At the time, aid workers raised the alarm months in advance but the international community failed to act. "We must not wait again until we see pictures of dying children," he added. From the Horn of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope, drought continues to impact the east coast of Africa. According to the United Nations, at least 12 million people in the region are now dependent on humanitarian aid. In Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, the drought has been particularly severe mainly because of the El Nino weather phenomenon. It has caused extreme weather meaning that rainy seasons did not materialize which devastated crops. According to the UN World Food Program's Chief Economist Arif Husain, the global humanitarian system is already struggling with a historic surge in migration plus huge operations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. It also faces precarious situations in Ukraine, Burundi, Libya and Zimbabwe. "It's almost overwhelming to comprehend that in the 21st century people are still experiencing famines of such magnitude. We're talking about 20 million people, and all this within the next six months, or now," he told Reuters. http://www.dw.com/en/up-to-20-million-threatened-by-drought-in-eastern-africa/a-37580220

That trend has been evident for some time now. The two retail sectors performing well are: 1. Luxury, expensive. 2. Cheap. Everything in the middle is getting absolutely decimated. Thats not necessarily true. Many luxury items are merely mid class items with a higher polish. My nephew wants to buy a Land Rover and a friend has one. I suggested a Honda Pilot or similar product from Toyota. The horror stories of the cost of installing a hitch on a Land Rover. $1300 US at a dealer for the receiver alone. Electrical problems and land Rovers are synonymous. The auto sector is the best counter argument to your suggestion. NAFTA has allowed the upgrading of all North American auto production features over the last 20 years. Every year more features are added yet prices remain pretty constant. You can buy a starter Nissan four door car with auto and A/C cheap. Nissan is a decent car, safe and with excellent product support. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/08/31/cheapest-car-us-2017-may-surprise-you/89588476/

I'm not sure what point we're trying to get to. The polar bear population has been on a rise for the last 40 years, they are considered a threatened species and may begin to lose numbers because of the loss of sea ice. That's where that lays. As for sources, you start posting articles about Polar Bears concentrated in a certain area written by someone promoting a book about Polar Bears attacking people who is a paid propagandist again global warming and yes...we're going to have something to say about that. You then post from a source that is trusted (oh, god forbid, it's NPR -we knew where you were going with that, btw) and it's in line with scientific consensus and you're not going to get any push back. Just stop posting from garbage sources. You kept posting stuff that literally was only using its self as a source. And what the fuck with that lady anyway, the author of Jaws is very vocal that he wish he never wrote that book because it created a paranoia against sharks resulting in widespread shark fishing and hunting. Why would anyone who has supposedly spent their life studying an animal want to create the same atmosphere for that animal? Completely correct. Brent is down to grasping at straws from the far corners of the interwebs. He sours every website for any scrap of false-fact or statement that can help him. I even applaud his enthusiasm. But as usual his posts and references miss the mark. "No means no, a federal appeals court has decided. No pelts. No heads. No claws. No fur rugs. Polar bear trophies may not be imported to the United States from Canada, even if hunted there legally. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided on June 18 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) correctly enforced provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) when it denied hunters the necessary import permits for polar bear trophies from Canada to the U.S." http://www.care2.com/causes/no-polar-bear-trophy-imports-to-u-s-says-federal-court.html US hunters are the only substantial hunting force on the populations of polar bears. The northern Canadian Eskimo(Inuit) communities have been devastated by this ruling. Ten thousand dollars flowed to each community for every bear hunted by a US hunter, prior to this ruling.

That ship sailed a long time ago. Agree. IMO royreader is a tool of Putin's ideology. IMO it was Putin that either ordered or suggested the gas attack. The Syrian air force is a mere shadow of anything it used to be. It cannot operate whatsoever without Russian support and Russian pilots. Daily flights from Russia arrive with the needed parts for helicopters and the few remaining attack aircraft. A week ago President Trump stated that it was hands off on Syria. On Tuesday it was clear that Assad could remain. Russia had guaranteed that Assad had removed all gas weapons as part of the deal with Obama. The deal that arose when the "Red Line" was broken from the last Syrian gas attack. So why would Assad use gas? Russians were at that airfield and knew about the attack. Assad was winning on the battlefield. The preliminary preparations are already underway for an attack by Kurdish forces, led and supported by US marines on the capital of the IS state,Raqqa. An attack thats likely to start as soon an Iraq forces finish off IS in Mosul. The only answer is Russia. Putin wanted to test President Trump. http://www.newsweek.com/trump-fumbles-putin-quietly-prepares-invade-his-neighbors-578565 The cynical side of me says that President Trump saw his polls and support slipping. That nothing rally's support of a nation like war or a military action. But I believe President Trump and the statements he made for the motivations for the attack. The biggest mistake Obama made in his presidency was failing to respond to the "Red Line" he made in Syria. In his defense he wanted the avoid the costly military entanglements that the US had over the previous 15 years. Avoid the deaths of young US service personnel. His extreme caution was exactly what Trump stated again and again as a citizen and as a president candidate. To say out of foreign wars. Where the US has no pressing national interest. President Trump sent an appropriate, directed response to several countries. First the response was to Putin who ordered the attack. To Assad who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. To Iran whose proxy forces in the Quds militias,the Hezbollah militias in Syria and Lebanon. Are the main fighters in Syria and support fighters in Iraq. Then he sent a message to North Korea that he means business in the upcoming discussions over its missile program. A response to Kim of North Korea who fired off a missile on the eve of President Trump's meeting with the Chinese leader. Trump responded to that insult as well. Naturally there was confusion and disjointed messages from President Trump. Tillerson said that this was a one off response. President Trump said that he wanted to work with allies to solve the Syria problems. Clearly this goes counter to everything that bannon thinks and lives for. Clearly the appropriateness of the response is due to the superb military leaders that Trump has surrounded himself with. Russia has responded by suspending the air defense cooperation agreement in Syria. It seems to have confidence in its S-400 and S-500 SAM systems. Israel has launched 1/2 dozen attacks on Syria already, with impunity. In the face of S-400 systems. They use SPICE standoff glide bombs. The USAF has a similar system. The US can attack anywhere in Syria with impunity without overflight by any aircrew. I accept the 5% boost that President Trump will likely get in the next two weeks. I applaud the removal of the idiot bannon from the inner circle. Some of Trumps supporters may question this action. President Trump got this one right. I applaud him for it as long as he doesn't lean on the military too much. The military is but a tool of the political. Without political leadership the military is but a wrench without a job to fix.