DJL

While there is a lot going on here I think it's pretty clear that this was a terrorist dressed as a general conducting state sanctioned terrorism in the form of proxy wars against the US. He was sanctioned by Obama in 2011 for plotting an assassination on US soil that would've killed hundreds of US citizens and was later designated a terrorist. The person he was killed with, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was a terrorist who conducted attacks against the US and fought against us as an insurgent. Muhandis was the leader of the Kataib Hezbollah milita which worked under the control of the Quds Force controlled by Soleimani.

Yeah, that kind of muddies the waters.

It's natural: So what? There have always been fires: Not this bad but thankfully they learned from the previous ones how to protect lives It's not hotter: Yes it is and this is exactly why they knew ahead of time that this year would be worse. That's a good example of people understanding the science behind predictions and taking action. Unfortunately you can't stop global warming with fire hoses, you can only treat the symptoms. So, where does that leave us? That global greening you love appears to have a downside. So far the cost is the difference between a "Normal fires always happen year" and the lives, property, wildlife, health issues associated with these fires.

12.35 million acres in Australia in total. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50951043

Except they're yelling, "Fires, always been fires, ya cunts!"

The Australian Fires are an example of the increase in extreme events and those who manage and react to their seasonal fires knew this would be a bad year. While you cannot look at any single event and say "that's it" this event poses an interesting perspective. They knew it was going to happen because they knew WHY it was going to happen and that's because this has been the hottest land temp year on record and in dry Australia that means forest fires. Even with previous plans in place to mitigate this exact scenario it has been a record event, it's only that previous planning that has kept down the loss in life. The answer is Yes, climate change is to blame for the Australian fires. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50341210 Australia is having their eyes opened to this and it'll be interesting to see what they do. They don't contribute much as far as greenhouse gases go but they're the largest worldwide exporter of coal. This is one of the main reasons they've seen so much industrial and blue collar backlash from moves to reduce emissions. They will feel it in their pocketbook.

Iraq is already calling for a vote for us to entirely remove our forces from the country. We left Syria, now we're out of Iraq. All those lives lost so we could safely plant our feet on that soil and conduct diplomatic, humanitarian and military operations.

Yup. That's the brick wall we're going to run into and we'll have just turned the clock back 30 years. Hope we have a plan.

This wasn't illegal but he chose a target a little further into the legitimate structure of a sovereign nation than your typical ISIS henchman. I think Putin likes that Iraq has also spoken out against this attack and the US could be down one more ally in the Middle East. Unless we move quickly with some diplomacy I wouldn't be surprised to see Iraq call for us to remove all forces and suspend all military flyover privileges of their airspace.

We were talking about this a while back, the subsidies were in place to get it started and there wasn't much lobbying to keep them because they're now a profitable enterprise. Win/Win.

I get what you're saying but it's just making a statement of total numbers, not about whether it's spread around. I don't think it's a terribly useful number considering that we could exclude guns like my 16 gauge bolt action and black powder 50 cal since nobody would ever use them in a crime or mass shooting. If we excluded hunting weapons and looked more at gun deaths and handgun ownership that would give us a better representation of how we compare in the misuse of weapons or ownership of weapons that are specifically for self defense or aggression.

Maybe you don't understand data. From wikipedia. Toggle the gun ownership column. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestreptalks/2016/07/13/this-architect-says-trump-almost-destroyed-his-business-but-that-doesnt-mean-they-cant-get-coffee/#6b409e2345de https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-bills-specialrepor/special-report-trumps-art-of-the-deal-dispute-your-bills-idUSKCN0T214Q20151113

I think that's the best way to go about it. There are great moral lessons from all the organized religions. The people who wrote much of their text had messages and philosophies that are worth sharing as there are common moral denominators between all of them. If I had children I would be happy to bring them to a Unitarian/Universalist Church, it's a good group of people.

I live in a city and am an athiest and have a large extended network of friends who live in cities and are religious, athiest or nothing. I haven't seen such a group. I'm sure you did read something somewhere that said that and I'm sure there was some kind of super liberal party or even onetime that looks a lot like a revival. I've been to a few green energy festivals and seminars in New England that were full of people who we would both consider to be judgmental elitist liberal assholes, yes they exist. But these allegorical cases of people being fervent about what they think we should do doesn't mean they're wrong about what we should do, they're just annoyingly passionate. I'm sure even Thunberg's parents and thinking "Oh come, just take the damn airplane".

To summarize, Superstition is any faith based belief other than one's own.

It's pure politicization. No substance. There are people who fear that global warming is destroying the planet and are overzealous. Got it.

US Baghdad embassy attacked by protesters angry at air strikes https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50956111 There are many things going on at once. First the backstory is that the US sent air strikes against Iran backed Hezbollah terrorists who were responsible for the death of a US citizen. This apparently was not sanctioned by the government of Iraq and they have said that this move violated their sovereignty. We (Trump) is blaming Iran for creating and supporting the protesters who attacked the US Embassy but were repelled by US soldiers using tear gas and flash bangs. So here we are with a protest over an issue for which the country has already made statements against us and the person claiming another country is responsible for it has been shown to get his information from conspiracy theories generated in Russia. This business will get out of control.

Sitting here on the verge of 2020 I can't blame anyone for being a blatant draft card burning protester during the Vietnam War. Americans need to be willing to fight for their country and Trump has no business wrapping himself in a flag regarding military matters but I don't hold draft dodging against him. He's not the only one who did it and there were many good reasons to not fight and die in that war. Our government defrauded the trust of the Americans we sent to die there. They fought for the best purposes of patriotism and slowing the crawl of Communism in South Asia only to be used as political pawns.

When we went Coed there were students from there who came over to VMI so there would be female upperclassmen. Good group of people.

I agree with this. If the economy moves to quickly a slowdown causes concern with investors and consumers when the slowdown happens equally as fast and can lead to a runaway fallout in the market. In my industry (building design/construction) I've watched two times now as we go from a glut of new projects in which builders want to go so fast that they don't even care if the plans are done to nobody picking up the phone. When these tariffs started to fuck up the current period of rapid growth I cheered.

Sssssshhhhhh. This was going to get good.

Yet other countries have a type of legislation and culture in place that doesn't result in as many guns on the street and incidents like this. Let's just stop saying that religion has anything to do with it, I think we've all cited enough examples and metaphors and jokes about how it has zero to do with religion, God's plan, or Christian understanding.

I went to Virginia Military Institute. Lot's of alcoholism issues as basically the culture was that once you were out of barracks you raged.