JamesHackerMP
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Posts posted by JamesHackerMP
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My father went to the magic kingdom (as he called it) back in 1993. It was for a deal between Tel Saudia and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon). He also remarked on the hospitality. I don't know if I'd go myself these days, but the pictures certainly look amazing.
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Wow this degenerated into anti/pro Trump pretty quickly.
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What be the effective consequences of a "hard Brexit"?
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On 7/7/2019 at 11:32 PM, Dougie93 said:
The Russian Federation and the CCCP are not the same country, Russia has no claims under the Potsdam Declaration as the Russian Federation did not exist in 1945 and so obviously was not signatory to
You make a treaty with a people not a particular government. The Russian Federation is the "legal heir" to the USSR.
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16 hours ago, SpankyMcFarland said:
BTW in the HoC there are votes of no confidence rather than non-confidence votes.
Our prorogation crisis with Harper showed yet again why the GG should be an elected position rather than being effectively chosen by the PM.
I believe that's the reason for the Australian republican movement. They don't want the GG being forever the creature of the PM. If Australia cut the monarchical ties with the British crown, and started electing its own president, for once, they'd have a head of state free from the tyranny of the head of government.
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Pretty sure I said the opposite.
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We just raised ours to $15 here. (slightly off topic but true nonetheless).
How much money has Bernie taken from special interests, and which ones?
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This was kind of scary if somewhat boring at times...
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anyone know how fast the capsule is going right before the chutes are deployed?
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Only a handful of people have even been in space. Only a dozen or so who have walked on the Moon, or orbited it in a command module. Sad, but then again it's expensive.
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Keep in mind that these cryptocurrencies are unregulated. No central bank to pass regulations to protect investors or the users of the respective currency. Do you really want to throw your money into something like that? You might as well be investing in a hedge fund in the 1920s.
YOu were right to ask people how it works to begin with, but I wouldn't start with a message board like this (despite the fact that I just answered you on it lol). Get a book on the subject.
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On 6/13/2019 at 11:28 PM, Franz123 said:
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.
another book I've failed to finish. Started losing interest, but up to that point it wasn't bad. But now I have seen the movie.
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On 10/19/2018 at 12:47 PM, DogOnPorch said:
Bored of the Rings is awesome. Freeto...Dildo...Pepsi and Moxy....Legolamb...Goodgulf...etc.
My favorite is "Eorache" (a literary conflation of Eowyn and Eomer).
PS, did I REALLY toss out a "spoiler"? It's in the second chapter of the book (or the first half hour of the first movie.)
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On 6/28/2019 at 12:09 PM, SpankyMcFarland said:
Sisi is already worse than either. Morsi brought about his own downfall with authoritarian policies but the West should have protested the overthrow of Egypt's first democratically elected leader more vehemently.
Why? Was it really in our interests to see the Muslim Brotherhood grab most of Parliament and the Presidency of Egypt? Try telling that to CIA.
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On 6/7/2019 at 5:30 PM, SpankyMcFarland said:
I’m just bowled away by the bravery and sangfroid of the Apollo mission astronauts and I’m sure that applies to anyone else who has been up there too.
Thank you for not making a topic about Apollo 11 about Trump or Nazis or "Down with America", etc, like one of the above posters has.
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You're in a similar pickle as me, Olijam (though perhaps in the opposite direction, but no matter).
While I cannot directly compare your politics to ours, I left the Republican party years ago but still cannot bring myself to join the democrats, as they aren't the answer either.
Sux to be so free-thinking, doesn't it?
Good for you, though!
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On 4/30/2019 at 12:46 AM, taxme said:
A telescope is something that I have always wanted to own but never bothered to buy one. What the hell am i waiting for is beyond me. How stupid is that, eh? No nasty reply, please.
Make sure you do research before you buy one. Do you want an old fashioned one (that you have to aim yourself) or a "go-to" that does it for you? Take into account that there is some legerdemain involved in the latter.
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For those of you who do not remember, Morsi was the democratically-elected President of Egypt, who came to power on the surge of what the western media inaccurately calls "The Arab Spring". Then, a year into his term of office, army officers who feared his constitutional shenanigens amounted to a coup, had him arrested and removed from office. He's been on trial several times.
BTW, I'm not showing sympathy or antipathy for Morsi. I believe the situation is interesting, however. One does wonder, however, if Pres. Sisi will end up like Mubarak, or even Morsi.
Thoughts?
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Mohammed Morsi, aged 67, dies during his trial. Here is a podcast link.
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Got to agree with you on that. Why proselytize when they already have a religion of their own?
There's nothing wrong with trying to spread your own views, until you start thinking that yours are so superior that you have to go around correcting other peoples'.
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4 hours ago, SpankyMcFarland said:
Sorry, I meant that in DRC and the US the presidential election is a one-off event with multiple candidates, unlike France and many other countries which have a two-round system. In general, this means that if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the first round then there is a run-off election between the two candidates with the highest number of votes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
Thus marginal candidates are out of the running in the second round and can’t split the vote. I suspect we will see more of these third, fourth and n’th party candidates in the US.
The other problem stateside is the Electoral College with its basis in a (generally) winner-take-all, state-by-state system rather than a simple, national vote. Republican candidates are tending to get a smaller proportion of the popular vote over time so the only way they can win is by getting all the Electoral College votes in a sufficient number of smaller states to overcome that disadvantage. It also means that candidates ignore states where the outcome is already decided like California and concentrate on the ‘battleground’ states.
Well, that's the danger of being a "predictable" voter, or someone who is loyal to one party: your vote is "expected" and the party or candidate in question doesn't have to work for your vote, since you've just given it away readily. Notice that battleground states are the ones that can go either way. Ohio for example, which is the mother of all battleground states, has a large percentage of moderate unaffiliated voters.
Maybe if people stopped treating federal politics like baseball (rooting for the "home team" and only caring that they win) they would have more power over politicians, however many parties there were/are.
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5 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:
It usually does take a while, if only because of the pace of changes to societal norms and cases with standing, but not always. This wiki list has durations as short as one year, and many far less than 58 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_overruled_United_States_Supreme_Court_decisions
Interesting.
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5 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:
But abortion was a crime until R v W. In cases of the SC changing its decision, it happened because new cases involving new adversaries brought new decisions that set new precedents. Essentially the new precedents made the old ones obsolete.
Yeah, but we still aren't talking about double jeopardy, we're talking about the SC overturning judgments it previously made.
Brexit from the European Union.
in The Rest of the World
Posted · Edited by JamesHackerMP
Do you think some people are turned off by the Byzantine and undemocratic structure of the European Union? It advertises itself as being not an actual government, yet acts like it. An imperial order in bureaucratic dress.
There's no prime minister or cabinet responsible to the European Parliament the way it is in most EU countries. From what I can tell it's hard to tell who's "in charge" at any given moment. In this sense it's not democratically accountable. Whatever exaggerations and oversimplifications there may have been during the runup to the 2016 referendum, or however simplistic the minds of the voters may have been, or who they are, one wonders if those who accuse it of being not democratically accountable don't have a point.