Kilkrazy wrote:
Trump's supporters will give him credit for anything, so what does it matter?

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

Practical results like nearly doubling Obamas economic growth without an economic stimulus?

a. literally false he's topped out at 4.4%. There's not a single quarter he's actually beat Obama's highest preforming growth, of 4.9%.

Besides, he *should* beat the economy of most of Obama's years. You know why? Because Obama was president during the recession if you remember. And Trump went into office to an extremely strong economy. If the economy during the Trump preforms worse than the economy under Obama, we've got an issue.

Potential peace with NK?

How are we any closer to peace with NK? Did they sign any binding deal? Did they do anything besides some empty promises? And if you payed attention they are still going after ICBMs.

Really? A sociopath? That is pretty over the top - considering he is just playing the game better than anyone else before him. Megalomanic...maybe...but a sociopath? Jezz. I honestly do not care so much about character traits in a leader. I care about results.

So.... putting us in a two way trade war and making pretty much all the world who didn't hate us yet hate us? I guess if those are the results you want.

I don't know if it's intentional or not. You seem to be missing the worst Obama years from your chart.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Trump's supporters will give him credit for anything, so what does it matter?

Except when he messes up, then it's all somebody else's fault.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Trump's supporters will give him credit for anything, so what does it matter?

Except when he messes up, then it's all somebody else's fault.

 whembly wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Trump's supporters will give him credit for anything, so what does it matter?

Except when he messes up, then it's all somebody else's fault.

I'll take "What is a partisan?" for $500 Alex...

 KTG17 wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The Chinese are still on their islands though. Trump isn't doing anything more against that than Obama did.

Of course they are, they are already built and manned. The only way to remove them at this point is via war. The point I was making is that something should have done when they started dredging.

Can't blame the guy in charge for the things that occurred before he got there. I guess the real rest will be if any more are built.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 whembly wrote:

Glad to hear things went well!

Thanks, the same to you!

Hows you dad doing too?

Dad is doing fine, no complications.

Seriously folks, you really only need one kidney.

This, people. And also, sign up to the organ donor register and tell your family that you have done so and want that wish respected after you have gone. You don't need your organs once you're gone but there are thousands of people who do and it can completely transform someone's quality of life or even save their life period.

 whembly wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 whembly wrote:

Glad to hear things went well!

Thanks, the same to you!

Hows you dad doing too?

Dad is doing fine, no complications.

Seriously folks, you really only need one kidney.

This, people. And also, sign up to the organ donor register and tell your family that you have done so and want that wish respected after you have gone. You don't need your organs once you're gone but there are thousands of people who do and it can completely transform someone's quality of life or even save their life period.

There's a bipartisan bill:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr6448
This is designed to help get new organs to people who need them more quickly. It would achieve this by making it easier for healthy people to defray the costs of donation and by trying new ways to improve the donor system to incentivize healthy organ donation.

If this bill becomes law, nonporfits & federal health agencies could try offering health insurance, scholarships, or other non-fungible incentives to promote healthy organ donation.

Frankly, I'd be okay with the government offering money as well. (pre-transplant for patient suffering from renal failures, it can cost up to a million dollars over 10 years.) I'd say $250,000 for current and past donors.

The system has plenty of checks in place to prevent abuse, says Matesanz. Firstly, three doctors independent to the transplant process must sign off on a donor as "brain dead" for the transplant coordinator to even be able to approach the family. Also, the family's interests are never ignored. "If a family is 100% sure they don't want the transplant, then the process is stopped," he says. However, even when a family first says no, in around 40% of cases, it subsequently changed its decision to yes, after discussions with the doctors about what is involved. This rate is even higher in hospitals with the most experienced transplant teams. In Hospital de Alicante on the eastern coast of Spain, for example, only 5% of families ultimately say no.

tneva82 wrote:
So according to un report not only nk continues missile production they also by-pass sanctions so well they have practically zero effect.

Good job Trump! Good job...

North Korea continuing nuclear programme - UN report

North Korea has not stopped its nuclear and missile programmes, violating UN sanctions, a report commissioned by the UN Security Council says.

It also says Pyongyang has resorted to a "massive increase" of illegal ship-to-ship transfers of oil products and has been trying to sell weapons abroad.

The confidential report by a panel of independent experts was submitted to the UN Security Council on Friday.

North Korea has so far not commented on the document's findings.

Last week, US officials said Pyongyang appeared to be building new ballistic missiles despite recent warming ties with US President Donald Trump's administration and pledges to denuclearise.

Unnamed US officials told the Washington Post that spy satellites had spotted continuing activity at a site that has produced ballistic missiles.

President Trump met North Korea's Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June, and the two leaders then pledged to work towards denuclearisation, without specifying exactly what this would look like.

Pyongyang is currently under a range of international and US sanctions over its nuclear programme and missile tests.

What did the UN report say?

The document was prepared by the experts monitoring the implementation of the UN sanctions against North Korea.

It was seen by several media outlets early on Saturday.

The report said: "[North Korea] has not stopped its nuclear and missile programmes and continued to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illicit ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products, as well as through transfers of coal at sea during 2018."

It said that Pyongyang also "attempted to supply small arms and lights weapons and other military equipment via foreign intermediaries" to Libya, Yemen and Sudan.

The experts concluded that North Korea's activities had made financial sanctions ineffective.

The report came as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he was "optimistic" that North Korean denuclearisation could be achieved.

Speaking ahead of a summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) in Singapore, he said: "The work has begun. The process of achieving denuclearisation of the [Korean] peninsula is one that I think we have all known would take some time."

He stressed that it was important to maintain "diplomatic and economic pressure" on North Korea to achieve "the final, fully verified denuclearisation".

He also said he had seen reports that Russia was issuing permits allowing North Koreans to work on its territory, defying the sanctions.

"I want to remind every nation that has supported these resolutions that this is a serious issue and something that we will discuss with Moscow.

"We expect the Russians and all countries to abide by the UN Security Council resolutions and enforce sanctions on North Korea," Mr Pompeo said.

Russia has denied a report by the Wall Street Journal that it was letting thousands new North Korean labourers into the country.

Attorney: Paul Manafort would not have left evidence ‘around’ if he was trying to break law

During a break, Paul Manafort’s lead attorney Kevin Downing offered a bit of Manafort’s defense on charges of failure to report foreign banks accounts. Essentially, he argued that if Manafort had known he was doing something illegal, he wouldn’t have been so easy to catch.
“Nobody intending to violate the law would leave the evidence around for his accountant to find it,” Downing said in court.
Judge T.S. Ellis III made the same point, summarizing the defense as, “There’s a trail in these documents that would lead to the truth, and somebody who violated the law wouldn’t have done that.”

tneva82 wrote:
So according to un report not only nk continues missile production they also by-pass sanctions so well they have practically zero effect.

Good job Trump! Good job...

 Xenomancers wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
So according to un report not only nk continues missile production they also by-pass sanctions so well they have practically zero effect.

Good job Trump! Good job...

If that is true - it's pretty unfortunate. Because that means we are going to war with North Korea.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

No baron, that is not how international law works. What you are proposing, aside from being technically very difficult to accomplish, is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property is always a war crime, even if you warn them beforehand. Not that anyone would care anymore at that point since China would retaliate in kind and wipe out the US west coast.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Actually an attack like that would be a war crime under the 1907 Hague Convention (article 3) which the US ratified. Which is how they convicted Japanese over Pearl Harbor. An unannounced attack without a state of war still qualifies as a war crime.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:


But point three certainly wouldn't fly under the 1977 Additional Protocol I, article 51 of the Geneva Convention:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Ever seen what a tsunami does? It more than qualifies as a war crime to create one.

 whembly wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
So according to un report not only nk continues missile production they also by-pass sanctions so well they have practically zero effect.

Good job Trump! Good job...

If that is true - it's pretty unfortunate. Because that means we are going to war with North Korea.

Ugh...

Trump should be given credit in trying to avoid war, no matter how much he bungles it...

I'd rather let SK get nukes of their own and encourage Japan to rebuild their military ('cuz them getting nukes is a tall order culturally) in order to ensure the MAD stance in the region.

Because a cold war is eminently better than a full-on war imo. An actual war isn't going to be like Iraq and Afghanistan... this would be beyond fugly.

Russia and China will NOT like that one bit...

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Actually an attack like that would be a war crime under the 1907 Hague Convention (article 3) which the US ratified. Which is how they convicted Japanese over Pearl Harbor. An unannounced attack without a state of war still qualifies as a war crime.

Hauge III only requires that a neutral party be informed. Informing Ghana or some other country not particularly concerned would meet that requirement (and the Japanese convictions were a big stretch of Hague, as the Dutch judge at the Tokyo Trial pointed out, for a variety of reasons)

The contracting Powers recognize that hostilities between themselves must not commence without previous and explicit warning, in the form either of a declaration of war, giving reasons, or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:


But point three certainly wouldn't fly under the 1977 Additional Protocol I, article 51 of the Geneva Convention:

Which allows indiscriminate attacks so long as the military value of the target justifies the collateral damage. China putting nukes on those islands certainly meets THAT test. Further, China has already thoughtfully eliminated civilians in the danger zone. The shape (and, more importantly, depth) of the south China sea means that the wave would crest and dissipate before it hit anything that might be called 'civilian' with a straight face.

Plus the whole point of using a tsunami would be plausible deniability.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Ever seen what a tsunami does? It more than qualifies as a war crime to create one.

What it does depends greatly on geography. The shoreline shallows in the south China sea would dissipate most of the force, since it would crest dozens of miles out at sea, causing a surge maybe ten feet high when it reaches anything that might be called civilian.

 whembly wrote:


Trump should be given credit in trying to avoid war, no matter how much he bungles it...

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud,” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Kobach, too, spoke around that time about how “some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.

"After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”

After a career of more than 20 years that has included stints as a state representative and the chairmanship of a committee on fisheries and wildlife, Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

“We had more transparency on a deer task force than I had on a presidential commission,” he said. “We had probably a dozen meetings. They were all public. We published everything we did in the newspaper and published results, including information we got from the public.”

In contrast, the voter-integrity panel was marked by obfuscation, secrecy and confusion related to the work the panel was engaged in.

“I was asking for a schedule,” he said. “If they had handed me a bunch of binders, I probably would have been satisfied. But they didn’t do that.”

So Dunlap filed a lawsuit against the commission while it was still active in November, alleging that he and the other Democratic members were being excluded from its work and materials. He received the documents he sought only in July, after a federal judge ordered the administration to turn them over, despite the objections of the Justice Department.

The materials provide a window into the panel’s operations. In one email, Christy McCormick, a Republican member of the commission, spoke to a staff member about recruiting a career statistician from the Department of Justice to the commission, writing that she was “pretty confident that he is conservative (and Christian, too).” Other documents showed what American Oversight, the accountability-focused nonprofit working on the lawsuit with Dunlap, said was an attempt to shut out him and other Democrat members. Another email showed one of Pence’s aides sharing with Kobach what he said was data about same-day voter registration in New Hampshire, which Kobach later used in a Breitbart column arguing that the alleged fraud had swung the state’s 2016 senate race.

Dunlap said there were many strange moments when he served on the panel, like the time John R. Lott Jr., a controversial economist described as an “NRA favorite,” testified about introducing a background check for voters modeled off the federal instant check process for acquiring a gun.

“It was surreal,” Dunlap said. “I was like why is this guy even here.”

He said he didn’t understand why people like Kobach continue to talk up the prevalence of voter fraud.

“Where are the indictments, where are the prosecutions?” Dunlap said. “But that’s sort of de rigueur here. You throw out a bunch of numbers about supposed voter fraud and it becomes the Halloween ghost story that keeps getting repeated. But nobody can really point to it.”

Kobach, who is running in the Republican primary for the governor’s seat in Kansas, did not return a request for comment sent to his office.

President Trump’s claim that as many as three to five million fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election remains one of his most notable falsehoods.

No credible evidence has ever been produced, by the White House or anyone else, to substantiate the claim. The commission, formally known as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, was formed in May 2017, and it quickly faced controversy from a wide array of groups, including many state officials from both political parties who objected to its requests for detailed data on voter rolls. By the time it was disbanded in January, it had drawn at least eight lawsuits, including Dunlap’s.

That lawsuit is not yet resolved. Dunlap says he believes that the committee may yet have more information to procure, while the government has said it wants to terminate the litigation, said Clark Pettig, a spokesman for American Oversight.

 reds8n wrote:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/08/03/paul-manafort-trial-day-4-what-to-expect-from-testimony-today/?utm_term=.7e5b003b7e89

Attorney: Paul Manafort would not have left evidence ‘around’ if he was trying to break law

During a break, Paul Manafort’s lead attorney Kevin Downing offered a bit of Manafort’s defense on charges of failure to report foreign banks accounts. Essentially, he argued that if Manafort had known he was doing something illegal, he wouldn’t have been so easy to catch.
“Nobody intending to violate the law would leave the evidence around for his accountant to find it,” Downing said in court.
Judge T.S. Ellis III made the same point, summarizing the defense as, “There’s a trail in these documents that would lead to the truth, and somebody who violated the law wouldn’t have done that.”

a surprising return for the old client is bad at being a criminal so he wouldn't have done it defense.


Presumably Dahmer is innocent too as a serial killer wouldn't just leave all that evidence laying around now would they ?

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

No baron, that is not how international law works. What you are proposing, aside from being technically very difficult to accomplish, is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property is always a war crime, even if you warn them beforehand. Not that anyone would care anymore at that point since China would retaliate in kind and wipe out the US west coast.

And I point out that this would not be a deliberate targeting of civilians. Minor point, but important one. The south China sea has a civilian population in the danger zone that might be measured in well, China made a point to eliminate them already, so I'll say dozens.

Two, the point of the use of a tsunami is to make use of plausible deniability. China isn't going to nuclear war over what might have been a genuine natural disaster.

As far as where i come up with these ideas? This one I actually got from the KGB. They had a similar plan for US bases in Japan, once upon a time. They gave up on it because, as you point out, it's technically difficult, and, in the case of Sasebo, was much more difficult to pull off then one hitting the south China sea.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

China was a signatory and the PRC considers itself the legal continuation of the Chinese state.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

In a large part of the shoreline it might dissipate depending on the choice of location. But that is by no means universal as significant parts of the Vietnamese and Philippine coast don't have that amount of protection and the damage would still be huge.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The KGB... I should have known. Leave it to the Russian secret services to come up with a typical evil cartoon villain plot... Seriously, I suspect that a large part of Russian secret service training consists of watching cartoons for ideas. Their plans are always so out-of-the-box and unnecessarily complicated. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they had tried to built a "freezinator" at some point.
I hate it when my country is run by a cartoon villain.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

China was a signatory and the PRC considers itself the legal continuation of the Chinese state.

Ah, see, I was of the impression they walked out on it in 1949, considering how heavily they violated it following that point

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

In a large part of the shoreline it might dissipate depending on the choice of location. But that is by no means universal as significant parts of the Vietnamese and Philippine coast don't have that amount of protection and the damage would still be huge.

Assuming the worst possible outcome (a tsunami 10x bigger than needed with freak sister wave) the only serious issue might be the harbor at Quy Nhơn where the very thin possibility exists of a large double surge if there IS a sister wave might cause casualties along the waterfront. Most of the rest of the coast is protected by the continental shelf, who's mean depth is about 100 feet deep. This means that the tsunami would crest in some places 20 miles from shore or more, massively dissipating the wave's energy.

Mind you, the wave would take about 3 hours to get there, assuming optimal placement of the landslide.

Note: my plan would only be about a thirty- forty foot wave, not a hundred footer like most people think of when someone says tsunami. We're trying to clear off some 10-20 foot high islands, not smash Hainan.

 Xenomancers wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
So according to un report not only nk continues missile production they also by-pass sanctions so well they have practically zero effect.

Good job Trump! Good job...

If that is true - it's pretty unfortunate. Because that means we are going to war with North Korea.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
So according to un report not only nk continues missile production they also by-pass sanctions so well they have practically zero effect.

Good job Trump! Good job...

If that is true - it's pretty unfortunate. Because that means we are going to war with North Korea.

WHY?




They are just doing the same gak they were doing before and have been doing for the last 20 years. Why do we need to go to war with them now?

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
But then are you going to repeat it over and over each time they rebuild?