jcsmith

“They should quit imagining things,” Piyapong said, warning that the junta would take action that would “gradually” move from soft to severe.

Perhaps that is what the protesters want. It would draw more international attention and condemnation to the beleaguered government. Either way this is not the way to respond to it.

5 hours ago, Boon Mee said:

Enough laws on the books as it is.  

Don't need any more. 

We're less than two months into the year and there have already been 8596 incidents of gun violence this year... 2322 deaths, adn 3944 injuries. That includes 89 kids ages 11 and under, 443 kids between the ages of 12-17, 35 mass shootings, and 259 unintentional shootings... 50,000 shooting incidents a year. We have enough laws and regulations?

Look, I get why the GOP does it. The NRA has given them bushels of money. It's shady... it's the swamp... But what I don't get is why you defend it? You are gaining nothing from it. You've been bamboozled.

The fact that the same people who support this also make up a large portion of the people who think we need tighter immigration laws, or think muslims are the problem. Those numbers in the first two months of this year dwarf the number of people injured or killed in islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11. Yet you see that as a major problem. Why isn't this?

Showing their true donors... err colors...

On 2/25/2018 at 8:46 AM, Langsuan Man said:

Don't worry according to Republican orthodoxy it will all trickle down 

Except all the evidence points to the fact that it doesn't... unless you are counting pissing all over the common people a trickle down.

On 2/19/2018 at 9:25 PM, i claudius said:

I cant even imagine in my wildest dreams Oprah as president of the USA lolapp

That's what people said about Trump. I hope she doesn't run, but I can't imagine her not being an improvement over the current white house.

On 2/19/2018 at 10:21 AM, ELVIS123456 said:

Guns dont kill people - people using guns do.

It's a lot easier to do a mass killing with a gun than it is with a knife or your bare hands. And it's a lot easier to do that with an assault rifle than it is with a six shooter.

28 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Given it's been over a year, and there has been ZERO evidence that anyone on Trump's team colluded with the Russians to interfere with the elections, and Rosenstein specifically said NO AMERICAN was involved in the current indictments, it's looking really good for Trump. There was interference in the elections by the Russians but not by Trump, or his team.

 

I guess the resistance must be getting despondent, as we don't hear about it, or calls for impeachment much anymore.

Uh... Emails where Russians offer dirt to Don Jr and he responds that he loves it and forwards to Manafort and Kushner, who then take a meeting about it isn't evidence? This information conveniently being left off Kushner's security forms (along with other Russian information)... Donald Trump helping them to form the statement when they realized it was going to go public which basically downplayed the meeting saying it was a meeting about adoptions. Not revealing the other people in the meeting until it became public? PapaD's drunken conversations that Russia had incriminating evidence before it was public knowledge... Roger Stone's Guccifer exchanges. The mysterious connection between a Trump server and Deutsche Bank which has never been explained. That is a ton of evidence of collusion and that is just what is publicly known... And that's before you even get into money laundering or obstruction of justice. And the question on obstruction is why obstruct if you aren't hiding something?

Gates is apparently ready to cut a plea bargain with Mueller now. And Schiff also recently stated that there is evidence of both collusion and obstruction which has not yet been released to the public. 

Sources: 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/14/trump-russia-investigation-evidence-collusion-obstruction-adam-schiff

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/15/politics/rick-gates-plea-deal-mueller-russia-investigation/index.html

1 hour ago, heybruce said:

Largely agree, except:

"there are many legitimate bots who simply retweet or share things"

A lot of "news" tracking sites for genre specific areas do this. Like for example, in video games it used to be gamers would go to news web sites to keep track of new releases, patch information, guides, things of that nature. Those often had a small amount of original data and a lot of stuff which was basically just referring people to news on the web related to whatever sub-site it was in. With social media a lot of those types of web sites have begun struggling as many people prefer to just get that information on social media. The bots basically will just monitor either hashtags or other sites which post articles, and then check for a date if it was within the past few hours they retweet it. It's completely automated. They also tend to automate finding people to follow, following people back, etc. 

Hashtags generally are a good thing, though have been badly exploited by malicious users. But for example if you put out a product and you are trying to get it some attention sending out a post with a hashtag gives it a chance to get out there, not only because users sometimes search those, but more importantly because the bots generally sit on certain hashtags related to their content. So like using the gaming angle again since that is my industry, if an indie developed game comes out it isn't likely to get press on the larger magazines or publications. However they can use hashtags like #indiegame #rts #newsteamrelease etc and the news will get picked up by a good number of bots and retweeted, which is a popular way to market, not just in gaming but in many industries. 

Of course the problem is when legitimate fake news and content exploits that system. If you want to get a fake news tweet about something out into political circles using a hashtag like #politics #politicalnews #donaldtrump #democrats or whatever will automatically get it retweeted by a lot of those same bots if they aren't filtering the sites that they get their news from (and many don't). With proper design of the bot you can have it retweet stuff only from sources you approve of, but a lot of users simply buy off the shelf software and aren't programmers so they just use default templates which often have no filtering at all. 

The other area that bots are really a major issue right now is that it's easy enough to have them monitor certain keywords and then add a comment which is just something random. You see a lot of those. In fact if you go to like youtube and monitor chat when watching a political news channel, a lot of that is bots, as well. But like if you wanted to make a bot that would just say something generic to trash or support donald trump for example you could have it monitor anything with the #donaldtrump hashtag or donald trump in the text, then have it automate a comment like, "this guy is a nazi" or, "#MAGA we love you Trump". Or even worse to put something racist or otherwise hateful in the comments, and a lot of that happens. By doing that or by up/downvoting stuff it's easy to paint the perception of users who don't realize that this is largely automated. Up/Downvoting also weights post importance so it can drive news off peoples front pages. It's easy to build detection on the quotes if someone keeps saying the same things, or if a group of people are saying the same things. It's tougher though with guys who have skill, and it's very tough to detect up/downvoting being automated.

It certainly will happen because the government is doing nothing to stop it, has no interest in doing so... Wonder why that is?

With regards to stopping bots, that is easier said than done. You can go through proxies or VPNs to try to mask their location, and there are many legitimate bots who simply retweet or share things, follow/unfollow which they really don't want to get rid of. The problem is a lot of bots retweet by hashtags and that becomes easily exploited by malicious bots. Certainly the social media sites can do more here, but it's not as easy as it sounds. It can all be traced but it's not an easily automated thing to do as there are many legitimate proxy/VPN/bot users, as well.

The easy solution is to punish the offenders. But when the offenders got said president elected, and he's shown absolutely no desire to punish them and has done the opposite, trying to ease sanctions and relationships... well good luck with getting that through. His own party participated in forcing him to impose stronger restrictions on Russia and he waited until the final day to impose them and balked at it, said it wasn't needed. If Trump doesn't take this seriously, it will happen again. And there is no indication that he intends to.

26 minutes ago, mania said:

There is the real problem as usual regardless of who is president

It's always high, but Trump claims the military has been depleted and has worked to increase it substantially.

Per the Rachel Maddow show today, this was the 8th time that Trump and Russia have had meetings, and the American media only found out about it from watching Russian news. Meaning the U.S. government... for whatever reason... is not announcing any of these communications. The American media got the news from the Russian media before the U.S. even acknowledged it. Why is that?

Better to be safe than sorry in situations like that. The Trump family has a lot of enemies.

He had to check for new orders.

5 hours ago, darksidedog said:

It happens everywhere. You can only repress people for so long and it seems that that time in Thailand is fast approaching. The end of the Junta is nigh.

The one thing that you can consistently count on in this country is that the junta will return in a few years. =(

1 hour ago, lannarebirth said:

 

You've got to the nub of the problem, but you're only halfway there. You're right it's about flawed people. You're wrong to think it is only Trump supporters. They are but a subset within that domain.

In terms of being stubborn in their ways and easily influenced, I'm not disagreeing. It's human nature. It's very dangerous in a situation like this though because the things that Trump puts out there are things which can split a country in two. He's extremely divisive. But when his divisions call into question the press, the FBI, the intelligence communities, and when whatever he says is parroted wholeheartedly on FOX News, that's going to influence the people watching it. And it's not the typical political types of ideals. In this case it could turn into something much worse. 

What happens when either Trump fires Rosenstein and Mueller, or Mueller indicts Trump? That's the direction things are heading. If Trump fires Rosenstein and he's replaced with someone who will fire Mueller, and the republicans in Congress do not impeach him, it's going to get ugly in terms of mass protests, it could very well turn violent. And if on the flip side to that Mueller subpoenas Trump and he refuses to show, or if he charges him and Trump stands off what happens then? When his supporters have been conditioned to question the FBI and the very institutions, and told that this is all a hoax? 

@hstew: Convicted of lesser charges only due to plea deals to provide additional information. They are cooperating for a reason. If all they had done was lie to the FBI and they have pleaded guilty of that, why would they need to cooperate otherwise? 

With regards to PapaD and Flynn I covered their bits in my post. Flynn called Kislyak told him not to worry about the sanctions that they would be different and Russia stood down. Multiple phone calls, lied about it, covered up by Flynn and the white house knew about this for weeks. Why? Papadopoulos was bragging about Russia and Hillary emails in May, he had that info in April... The rest of the world didn't even know about the DNC hack at this point. His involvement there is certainly why he is cooperating.