BeginnersMind

All due respect to your son, what do you base this on?

Yes they do @Rob's House Always good to eat this kind of crow though, right?

White guy love.

Reilly. Ignored by NFL GMs for 3 straight seasons. Hogan was decent even with Bills. Reilly can’t beat out Foster. That’s about all we need to know.

Goes to show how bad Reilly was doesn’t it?

Mrs Reilly, 32 NFL GMs can’t be wrong.

How about the guy who said Allen and Edmunds were busts last week?

I’d give a 4th for him. He’d be a nice add.

Phew. I was worried the sky wasn’t falling.

He passed on Brady 7 times! He'll be back after the next 20 point loss.

Very classy. I continue to love McD and want him to succeed.

It’s your prerogative not to answer questions again, but no, I’ll not be reading all 160 thread pages. Other posters and believer’s don’t share your DS definition, which is why I ask. I can’t decipher a definition of what it is meant to encompass besides something like what was once called the Establishment in different generations, a sort of catch all repository for “the man.” I’m asking if it’s more specific with a specific agenda or just the thing that catches blame for rich and powerful people’s (“the establishment’s”) interests. Sorry I touch a nerve with you and the deeper believers. I ask the questions trying to see the appeal of this.

What I'm asking is different. Are the named people, let's take the Clintons for example, part of a centralized power structure in your opinion? Or just one of many interests looking after themselves and their friends? What I'm asking is not meant to be a trap. Your OP listed all kinds of different groups of interests. My question was about centralized leadership. And again, it seems you answered that point: The DS is any one of many different government, corporate, private, interests. But it seems (you tell me) that you don't think there is a central cabal. There is no way for Clinton to pass Tim Geitner in a hall and share a secret wink or share a cocktail on the planning weekend on Richard Branson's island. Call me dishonest if you want. I'm trying to understand the parameters of what the DS is. Joesixpack, for example, says it's "corrupt and politicized elements of the unelected civil service," which is surely something to abhor, but it represents a disorganized leviathan of interests, so I don't believe you share that definition. And if it is, how do you unpoliticize civil servants, who are, after all, just people?

Didn't you just tell me there is a Google alternative? Anyone can use it or Bing, both of which offer comparable or better results to Google. So what happened to Bell doesn't ring (!) true as a good analogy and that's my point. No one HAS to use Google or especially Facebook. Sessions won't be able to push an antitrust case, is my guess. HE might work other angles with them as media companies.

This is what I'm thinking and why I would call Sessions's approach groundbreaking. He will probably try to shoehorn Google in as a media outlet or maybe a telecom company, where there is precedent.

That's the lesson from *this*? Who didn't know that Google or any Tech startup out of the SV is liberal? I work in a field that Google single-handedly flipped on its head through lobbying and then an administrative appointment.

That will certainly be a groundbreaking case to make.

Conservatives started a "news" network. Start a search engine and social media machine if you think it's so biased. GoDuckGo is right there for you. Sounds like Trump is bringing in the big government regulators to try to break them up. Will see what Sessions comes up with.

Yes, but the real line here is talking about it and doing it. Talking about starting Nate Peterman in game 2 : Bad Starting Nate Peterman in game 2 = disaster. I've talked with people over beers about the things they would do with their guns given a clean shot at [insert name du juor]. What is our reaction supposed to be to people who talk about doing bad (not illegal even) things?

Regarding the book, here were some of my thoughts. Pinker takes aim at the people who live in fear of violence and act like the world is an increasingly dangerous place. He makes a compelling case for all the reasons that violence is on the decline: 1- The Leviathan-the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary; 2-Commerce-the rise of "technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners," so that "other people become more valuable alive than dead;" 3-Feminization-increasing respect for "the interests and values of women." (Said another way, men fight wars. Women are smarter than that. 4-Cosmopolitanism- the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media; 5- The Escalator of Reason-an "intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs," which "can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won." (thanks to Wikipedia for gathering the quotes!) He backs his observations about the rise in each of these with hundreds of convincing graphs and lots of anecdotes. Of the anecdotes, he often relies on the violence of the Bible as some source of a reflection of the world people accepted, but later, oddly dismisses modern movie violence as fantasy. And while some of his anecdotes based in reality are accurate and sobering reflections of historical society like public torture and animal cruelty for fun, by mixing them up, he undermines his credibility. And his data treks also mash up speculation with reality, further calling into question some of his conclusions. On the one hand, murder rates have 100% declined according to his data. But regarding wars, only by some statistical manipulation (deaths per capita) and relying on the fact that our data about war deaths is woefully incomplete in many wars, can he argue that wars have become less deadly. And he places a tremendous amount of weight in the fact that although WWII was the deadliest war we've known, it was 70 years ago so we're clearly learning our lesson. As if 70 years was an epoch in the span of humanity from which we can forecast the future of the species, when we know 70 years is a hair's breadth on the scale of time. That's the fly in the ointment for me on Pinker. And while that critique sounds damning, many of his other arguments about how we're better off do not suffer from the same defects. Roesling's book had some similar manipulations but overall, the conclusion was hard to refute.

I am surprised by this. If he has no evidence that she's a fraud, this is overplaying his hand, which was already fine because he already won. Kavanaugh is going through as he should, based on what we now know. Attacking the victim for not reporting is a bad idea--unless he has some lock-tite info that she's a fraud and he knows it's going to come out. Yeah--looks legit. That is a hilarious photo!

I have seen the actual photos of Biden and the hands. It is strange for sure. That photo looks fake as crap, and is that Steve Carrell in the back (with the hat that does not match).

Biden is in a funny spot. He was not exactly a hero to the left in the Hill hearings. He’d probably like all this to go away.

Ever see the Twilight Zone about the guy who flips a coin, it lands on its edge, and for the rest of the day he can read minds? Spoiler: He breaks up a bank robbery by a long time employee only to find that the employee thinks about robbing the bank every day for the last 20 years. People think about doing bad **** all the time. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Do = bad.

I had business dealings with an alternate currency in the early 2000s. I could never see any rationale for its use besides a few hippie communes and a lot of drug and human trafficking. Most of the people involved ended up indicted, though they were not personally involved in any of the darker crimes.