deskthority

Kansas GOP just passed a (non-binding, purely symbolic) resolution proclaiming that porn viewing causes erectile dysfunction. Might be a problem for some of you single boys. Of course, they didn’t have any trouble voting for a presidential candidate famous for peeping on teenage beauty pageant conte...

(This is a clip, but the full hearing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_IRnDlxKQ is worthwhile. This Senate Intelligence Committee investigation and hearings are not going to go well for Putin.)

Clinton Watts also did a CNN interview:

webwit: you need more practice. That was 240 characters, 100 over the limit. Here, I edited things down for you:

webwit: Have you considered taking up 3AM twitter ranting as a hobby? The medium seems like a great stylistic match for you, you could mix in occasional mushroom pictures, and you could even be bosom buddies with the US President!

You're a nasty cunt and a failure of a human being. I see you’ve upgraded from 1990s playground insults to Elizabethan-era obscenities. If you’re going to reach back that far though, you might as well go all out, and call me a ragabash nincompoop or a saddle-goose bespawler... you know, something t...

I present for your amusement: https://republicinsanity.tumblr.com/
(Don’t read too many of these in a row though, if you want to maintain any shred of faith in humanity.)

Party of (literally) poison. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/us/politics/epa-insecticide-chlorpyrifos.html?_r=1 Late last year, EPA scientists came to the conclusion that chlorpyrifos (a.k.a. Dursban), a chemical similar to nerve gas, should be banned (in 2000 they “ found that it could damage th...

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/energy-department-climate-change-phrases-banned-236655 “A supervisor at the Energy Department's international climate office told staff this week not to use the phrases "climate change," "emissions reduction" or "Paris Agreement" in written memos, briefings or o...

Sorry seebert. If there were a meatier discussion with less petty name-calling and a meaningful effort to engage by all interlocutors here, it would be possible to get into the context and history a bit. There were a few posts where I tried to do that a couple dozen pages ago, which were predictably...

Here’s one webwit should be concerned about: apparently 1000+ civilians killed in air strikes in Iraq and Syria this month alone. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/27/ ... ans_killed

Thanks fohat. I found the interview quite enlightening, and shared it and the New Yorker piece it’s based on with a number of other folks.

Daniel: I know you’re really grumpy about the typewriter thing, to the point that it apparently re-grumps you every time you see my name, but come on. I’ve made a small fraction of the posts in this thread, and a much smaller fraction of the content-free whining, name-calling, weird meta speculation...

There’s been more off-topic whining, lame insults, and looping meta-discussion in this thread than there has been content. There were points a while back where we were having some decent level of information sharing going on, until a few members dumped their steaming insult shitpile over the whole t...

I promise you Ratfink that Deskthority links will have no effect on the google-juice of random news articles in mainstream newspaper websites. I agree that someone comes out looking bad though: The US Republican Party, for instance in the state of North Carolina, where they’ve been on an un-American...

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: ↑Construction toys like Meccano and LEGO Technic couldn't replicate the real world sufficiently

Meccano (“Erector” in the US) is pretty good for prototyping mechanical stuff, especially since kids aren’t typically allowed to operate heavy machinery.

I suspect my 7-month-old son’s IQ is probably higher than anyone chatting recently here. He can say “ya ya ya” and knows how to clap, yank the dog’s tail, drop food on the floor, and flail his arms. He’s also quite smiley and polite to strangers. He secretly has a unified theory of physics, composes...

No, but I do have one in mechanical engineering - non linear thermodynamics and fracture mechanics. I’m amazed. I’ve never met such an aggressively childish Ph.D engineer face-to-face, so willing to talk big and so afraid of evidence and logical argument. I guess there’s room for all kinds in the w...

you can't even use a dictionary. [...] Clearly, you don't understand how statistics work. Can you explain these in detail for poor little retarded me? I’m assuming you have a statistics Ph.D or something? The furthest I ever got was a couple of undergraduate statistics courses for math majors, and ...

The Washington Post is a “circle jerk for retards”? Okay then. Adhoc: since webwit apparently doesn’t know what the word “retard” means, perhaps you can enlighten us with your definition? My dictionary says “a mentally handicapped person”. Can you list the mental handicaps you think all (or most?) W...

The entirety of the US news media is an “enemy of Trump for business reasons”. The primary of those business reasons: Trump has placed himself in direct opposition to American democracy and to the interests of the people of the world, and readers want to know about it. Unfortunately for the Washingt...

Are you unironically posting washingtonpost links as news source? Get the fuck out of here. Is this a joke? The Washington Post is one of the world’s foremost daily newspapers, one of the top two daily newspapers in the USA, which has won numerous awards and accolades over its 140-year history, inc...

Ah yes, the “partisan click bait” Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, PBS, BBC, Guardian, Wired, Ars Technica, Businessweek, Forbes, New Yorker, Atlantic, Economist, .... Look, if you don’t want to have an off-topic discussion, get rid of the off-topic section of the site...

Apparently Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are outraged about a children’s picture book wherein a little boy likes to wear a dress.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/edu ... omplained/

you nasty retard I don’t understand what you are trying to say, webwit. Could you please define your terms (“nasty” and “retard”), and then provide some kind of argument or documentary evidence that they are apposite to the discussion? To be generous, I can only assume that now that Hillary Clinton...

Sounds like the wheels are starting to come off:

Looks like Trump/Ryan’s shit sandwich healthcare plan is dead in the water. Low-energy Trump now says he’s tired of working on healthcare. Blames Democrats. Remember, the House GOP voted to repeal the ACA 54 times when it didn’t matter. Now that their vote will have real effects, they have nothing. ...

Republican state legislators in multiple states have received new talking points (you can tell it’s coming from some central source because they all parrot almost precisely the same line) about their unconstitutional efforts to disenfranchise voters: Yes, they accept that there is no evidence of vot...

So the conspiracy theorists pulling Trump’s puppet strings and have spent >$80 million dollars on twisting US politics in the past few years (a) are funding a collection of 14,000 human urine samples, and (b) think that nuclear war is good for humanity? Okay wow. This is a rabbit hole I don’t want t...

Senate Republicans just voted to let internet service providers sell customer browser history to advertisers, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/senate-votes-to-let-isps-sell-your-web-browsing-history-to-advertisers/ We should just post a list of everyone’s favorite news sites, medical conc...

Nunes, the House Intelligence chair, is incompetent, and possibly compromised (frankly that’s a fair summary of most House Republicans, but is unacceptable for the intelligence committee chairman). He is both trying to provide inept and transparently bogus political cover for the White House, and le...