[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

I just want a giant ship with wheels on it. Or, at the very least, tank treads. Is that too much to ask for?

I'll do you one better!

IMAGE(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/supcom/images/4/47/Salem_insitu.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20070502002038)

While Iran is also capable of lying about it, I have a heuristic I'm applying to this story:
If we never hear about it again, Occam's Razor suggests that the Navy shot down one of our own drones and is now embarrassed and covering it up. If the US military does keep pointing at it, then it might have been an Iranian drone.

Yonder wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

I just want a giant ship with wheels on it. Or, at the very least, tank treads. Is that too much to ask for?

I'll do you one better!

IMAGE(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/supcom/images/4/47/Salem_insitu.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20070502002038)

Is that Brotherhood of Nod engineering there?

thrawn82 wrote:
Yonder wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

I just want a giant ship with wheels on it. Or, at the very least, tank treads. Is that too much to ask for?

I'll do you one better!

IMAGE(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/supcom/images/4/47/Salem_insitu.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20070502002038)

Is that Brotherhood of Nod engineering there?

The USMC amtracks are big, boat like, and have tank treads.

Did they recapture the one the British marines captured a few weeks ago?

It's a tit-for-tat move because the British seized an Iranian oil tanker a few weeks ago, claiming that it was breaking international sanctions and taking oil to Syria. The Revolutionary Guard even said that they'd seize a British tanker in retaliation.

This is very, very good.

Andy Ngo Has The Newest New Media Career. It's Made Him A Victim And A Star.

A little more than two years ago, Andy Ngo was more or less a nobody: a 30-year-old multimedia editor for the student paper of Portland State University, where he was working toward a master’s degree in political science. He had gone back to school after spending several years languishing in the millennial male purgatory of underemployment and aimlessness. He had about a thousand followers on Twitter, where he posted mostly about anti–free speech left-wing campus culture and the need to reform political Islam.

Twenty-seven months later, Ngo is very much a somebody. Though his career output is limited to a few dozen op-eds and news stories, an active Twitter feed, some cable news appearances, and a handful of dramatic protest videos, his name is now regularly uttered by members of Congress — including some who have proposed federal investigations on his behalf — by cable news megastars, and by Joe Biden, the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. He now has almost a quarter of a million followers on Twitter.

He, of course, owes the most recent surge in his fame to the June 29 assault. The attack and its bloody aftermath, captured on video by witnesses and Ngo himself, launched a national media cycle predicated largely on the willingness of various liberal public figures to denounce the violence of the far left. In the past week, President Trump has publicly condemned the attack twice. Smaller, semantic debates have spun off, mostly on Twitter, about the nature of the word “journalist” as it applies to Ngo and the nature of the word “violence” as it applies to nonphysical harm.

The former debate turns on the extent to which Ngo deliberately provokes angry and violent responses from anti-fascists. I was with Ngo, watching him, from an hour before he entered the demonstration until an hour after he arrived at a Portland hospital to be treated for his injuries. Nothing he did that day suggested that he planned or even secretly wanted to be assaulted, which has been a common enough refrain in the days since from some on the left. The attack was not provoked.

But it would be a mistake to think this violence came out of some vacuum-sealed ideological intolerance toward conservatives. Ngo has been building to a dramatic confrontation with the Portland far left for months, his star rising along with the severity of the encounters. “Hated by antifa,” Ngo’s Twitter biography read before and after the attack. Scary-looking antifa marchers glare from his account’s banner image. Before I arrived in Portland, he suggested that it might be good for my story to go get a drink with him at Cider Riot, a far-left hangout. The man’s literal brand is that anti-fascists are violent and loathe him.

And it’s a healthy brand in a robust market for footage of left-wing violence. Shouting, running around in black, sometimes smashing store windows and punching people, anti-fascists make for good television. But even accounting for that, the amount of coverage Fox News devotes to them is preposterous. A search for “antifa” on Fox News’ website from November 2016 to the present returns 668 results, while “homelessness” returns 587, and “OxyContin,” 140. “Permafrost” returns 69. A decentralized, leaderless activist group with no record of lethal violence in this country, antifa has been skillfully transmogrified by the conservative media into one of the gravest threats facing Americans in 2019 — the rampant id of an already irrational left.

Though Ngo’s work is probably best described as media activism, the debate over what to call him has ignored the way the journalism business is trending. A part of a new generation of what the writer Max Read termed “busybody” journalists, Ngo at rallies practices a kind of participant reporting that alternates freely between mocking the far left, anthropologizing it, and cowering from it. He is willing to make himself the story and to stream himself doing it. He proceeds from a worldview and seeks to confirm it, without asking to what degree his coverage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And he does so under the cover of a political and cultural context in which it is widely assumed that there is another side that also has a media apparatus operating in exactly the same way.

Because Ngo is a freelancer and effectively produces left-wing rage content on spec for the conservative media beast from nose to tail, he assumes all the risk for the content he makes, and the risk is real enough. It’s as neat an arrangement for Twitter as it is for Fox News, just as freelancers are a neat arrangement for any large media conglomerate on the left, right, or center. In that sense, Ngo may not be as far from the mainstream of journalism as many of us might wish to think.

Even as it shrinks, the national media is reorganizing around a social media–to–cable news pipeline of daily outrage. It is shedding the skin of its once-sacred “view from nowhere” objectivity and embracing the benefits of cruder ideologies. It wants eyeballs, but it doesn’t want to pay for material. Why do that when a generation of strivers will do it for free, or close to it? No, it’s not so hard not to see Andy Ngo as one vision of the journalist of the future, self-employed in an Uberized model that gobbles up inflammatory content and takes no responsibility for how it’s gathered. These media workers will be ambitious, ideological, incurious, self-promoting, social media native, willing to force the story, and very, very vulnerable.

thrawn82 wrote:
Yonder wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

I just want a giant ship with wheels on it. Or, at the very least, tank treads. Is that too much to ask for?

I'll do you one better! [picture of walking ships]

Is that Brotherhood of Nod engineering there?

Those walking ships are Cybran T2 Destroyers, from SupCom. (Brotherhood of Nod? Pff! Wrong RTS series and generation! Pistols at dawn, sir!)

Just to be absolutely, annoyingly clear: The Wasp-class is an "amphibious-assault ship", not an "amphibious assault-ship".

(Just don't tell Individual 1; it's probably better/safer to let him think we have walking ships. Pew pew!)

Archangel wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
Yonder wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

I just want a giant ship with wheels on it. Or, at the very least, tank treads. Is that too much to ask for?

I'll do you one better! [picture of walking ships]

Is that Brotherhood of Nod engineering there?

Those walking ships are Cybran T2 Destroyers, from SupCom. (Brotherhood of Nod? Pff! Wrong RTS series and generation! Pistols at dawn, sir!)

Just to be absolutely, annoyingly clear: The Wasp-class is an "amphibious-assault ship", not an "amphibious assault-ship".

(Just don't tell Individual 1; it's probably better/safer to let him think we have walking ships. Pew pew!)

If he was literate enough to understand the difference, he still wouldn't understand the difference.

A New Red Scare Is Reshaping Washington

WASHINGTON — In a ballroom across from the Capitol building, an unlikely group of military hawks, populist crusaders, Chinese Muslim freedom fighters and followers of the Falun Gong has been meeting to warn anyone who will listen that China poses an existential threat to the United States that will not end until the Communist Party is overthrown.

If the warnings sound straight out of the Cold War, they are. The Committee on the Present Danger, a long-defunct group that campaigned against the dangers of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, has recently been revived with the help of Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, to warn against the dangers of China.

Once dismissed as xenophobes and fringe elements, the group’s members are finding their views increasingly embraced in President Trump’s Washington, where skepticism and mistrust of China have taken hold. Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies, where Beijing’s rise is unquestioningly viewed as an economic and national security threat and the defining challenge of the 21st century.

“These are two systems that are incompatible,” Mr. Bannon said of the United States and China. “One side is going to win, and one side is going to lose.”

The United States and China have been locked in difficult trade negotiations for the past two years, with talks plagued by a series of missteps and misunderstandings. Mr. Trump has responded to the lack of progress by steadily ratcheting up American tariffs on Chinese goods and finding other ways to retaliate. China has responded in kind.

The two sides now appear far from any agreement that would resolve the administration’s concerns about China, including forcing American companies operating there to hand over valuable technology. Even if a deal is reached, the two sides are busy constructing broader economic barriers.

The Guardian: How Trump’s arch-hawk lured Britain into a dangerous trap to punish Iran: With the seizure of a supertanker off Gibraltar, distracted UK government was set up by John Bolton as collateral damage

With that backstory, I don't think Iran seizing the Stena Impero will provide the casus belli that Bolton wants. At the very least, the UK's oil fleet is now tacitly unprotected due to the US's behavior.

Meanwhile, Iran seems to be trying to bait Trump specifically, because the US military isn't taking the bait.

WP: Why the United States is playing rope-a-dope with Iran in the Persian Gulf

KABUL — Iran’s biggest frustration right now may be that despite its escalating tactics in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. military is refusing to be provoked — denying Tehran for now the showdown it seems to want.

The latest evidence of the United States’ seeming “rope-a-dope” strategy toward a flailing Iran came Friday, when the Iranians seized a British-flagged tanker and boarded and then released a second British-owned tanker. The United States has not taken any visible retaliatory action, in what seemed a calculated nonresponse.

Oh, and in domestic news:

WP: An onslaught of pills, hundreds of thousands of deaths: Who is accountable?

The origin, evolution and astonishing scale of America’s catastrophic opioid epidemic just got a lot clearer. The drug industry — the pill manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers — found it profitable to flood some of the most vulnerable communities in America with billions of painkillers. They continued to move their product, and the medical community and government agencies failed to take effective action, even when it became apparent that these pills were fueling addiction and overdoses and were getting diverted to the streets.

This has been broadly known for years, but this past week, the more precise details became public for the first time in a trove of data released after a legal challenge from The Washington Post and the owner of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia.

The revelatory data comes from the Drug Enforcement Administration and its Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS). It tracks the movement of every prescription pill in the country, from factory to pharmacy .

Thats it!
Bill Maher is now Trump's new head of the DEA.

You should absolutely believe an article based on data from the government agency that created the actual epidemic of deaths by going after doctors who are prescribing painkillers to people who need them, forcing people who got addicted to turn to dangerous illegal supplies. We're winning the War on Drugs!

Aetius wrote:

You should absolutely believe an article based on data from the government agency that created the actual epidemic of deaths by going after doctors who are prescribing painkillers to people who need them, forcing people who got addicted to turn to dangerous illegal supplies. We're winning the War on Drugs!

Keep saying that enough and maybe the Sackler Family will cut you in of the profits.

Aetius wrote:

You should absolutely believe an article based on data from the government agency that created the actual epidemic of deaths by going after doctors who are prescribing painkillers to people who need them, forcing people who got addicted to turn to dangerous illegal supplies. We're winning the War on Drugs!

I can’t tell if you have a dog in this fight (the bit about worrying about people who need painkillers) or if this is just another place where you can do a blame the state rant.

I saved one family member from a crippling opioid addiction. Before my mom died she was on high doses of fentanyl and they still gave her pills as well. She and this family member were able to get hundreds of pills a month each.

This is a real thing that’s affected real people. It’s not some random jumping off point to grind your rhetorical ax against the government.

DSGamer wrote:

This is a real thing that’s affected real people.

Yes, it is - and the people who have pain issues are real people too. And there are a lot of them. The only problem is that the DEA doesn't give a sh*t about them. And they often kill themselves when they can't get relief from the pain.

Yes, addiction is a real problem. But keeping people from getting drugs from doctors makes that problem worse - a lot worse. The vast majority of opioid epidemic deaths are from street drugs - deaths involving prescription opioids have been going down for years, while deaths from street drugs have been spiking.

If you had a chronic pain issue that made you suicidal when you didn't get your meds, what you would do if you couldn't get them from your doctor any more?

Yes, people turn to street drugs when they can't get them prescribed anymore, but they became addicted to the prescription drugs in the first place because since the 90's drug manufacturers have been "encouraging" Dr's to prescribe opiates for more and more conditions, not only for relatively minor issues that wouldn't normally require opiates, but also for conditions that are entirely off label. Blaming docs for not handing out enough prescriptions to people hooked due to overprescription is an extremely... inventive... take on the issue.

Aetius wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

This is a real thing that’s affected real people.

Yes, it is - and the people who have pain issues are real people too. And there are a lot of them. The only problem is that the DEA doesn't give a sh*t about them. And they often kill themselves when they can't get relief from the pain.

Yes, addiction is a real problem. But keeping people from getting drugs from doctors makes that problem worse - a lot worse. The vast majority of opioid epidemic deaths are from street drugs - deaths involving prescription opioids have been going down for years, while deaths from street drugs have been spiking.

If you had a chronic pain issue that made you suicidal when you didn't get your meds, what you would do if you couldn't get them from your doctor any more?

We should have more robust treatment is the answer. Suboxone treatment is fairly effective and isn’t that expensive in the grand scheme of things. Once again, I know because I paid for a family member to go through it.

The crackdown of the last few years has been really hard on some people. They shouldn’t have flooded the market with pills in the first place, which was the point of the article. But once they did the answer to this is to force insurance to cover addiction recovery.

Harm reduction focused treatments aren’t that expensive. We just have a terrible healthcare system in the US. Mostly private insurance.

ruhk wrote:

Blaming docs for not handing out enough prescriptions to people hooked due to overprescription is an extremely... inventive... take on the issue.

You might have missed this, but I'm not blaming the doctors. I'm blaming the DEA, which started forcing doctors to stop prescribing pain meds regardless of what happened to their patients. If you read the stories I linked, you can see the results of that.

Is someone who is taking opioids to handle a chronic pain issue an addict? Or are they just taking meds so they can have a life without constant pain?

You want so badly for capitalism to be at fault you're ignoring the very real problem - and market - those drugs were created to solve.

Aetius wrote:

You want so badly for capitalism to be at fault you're ignoring the very real problem - and market - those drugs were created to solve.

Oh, the irony. It burns.

It wasn't the government who lied to doctors (and regulators) about the addictiveness and the time course of the new opiate drugs. It wasn't the government who, when doctors noticed that effectiveness tapered off after 6-8 instead of the advertised 12 advised doctors to proscribe higher doses rather for more frequent doses... and sued doctors who did try to prescribe on a shorter time course.

This isn't an issue of innocent Purdue hamstrung by evil government regulation, this is an issue of purdue et al deliberately and knowingly harming patients because that is what maximized sales and profits.

Aetius wrote:

You might have missed this, but I'm not blaming the doctors. I'm blaming the DEA, which started forcing doctors to stop prescribing pain meds regardless of what happened to their patients. If you read the stories I linked, you can see the results of that.

The only mention of the DEA from the Politico article you linked to was a quote from Steven Henson, an emergency room doctor in Wichita, Kansas, who complained that his medical license had been suspended because several of his patients illegally sold the pain medications he prescribed.

What the Politico article didn't mention was that back in 2016 Henson had been indicted on 31 criminal counts including conspiring to distribute prescription drugs outside his medical practice and unlawfully distributing oxycodone, methadone and alprazolam and that three of Henson’s co-defendants had already pled guilty.

The investigation found that rather than being an "emergency room doctor" Henson operated two clinics where he charged $300 to write pain medication prescriptions. One of Henson's patients who illegally sold the drugs he prescribed said that he met with Henson for five minutes, claimed he had a neck injury, and Henson wrote him a prescription without asking him to fill out any paperwork, provide medical records of his injury, or even perform his own medical evaluation. The same patient complained that it took him three weeks to sell the drugs “because Henson has so many patients that there were just too many pills on the street in Wichita."

And that's what had started the DEA's investigation into Henson back in 2014. The agency was getting multiple complaints a day from Kansas pharmacists who were concerned about the validity of Henson's prescriptions because they involved large quantities of oxycodone, hydrocodone, alprazolam, and phentermine. The pharmacists noted that “that if they fill one Henson patient, five more will show up the next day … that the pharmacies do not have the controlled substances in stock to keep up with the rate.”

One of Henson's patients overdosed on the alprazolam and methadone he had prescribed.

When the DEA executed a search warrant on his house Henson let them in and--after they had been there for 90 minutes--called 911 to report an armed burglary. The judge noted that the ensuing police response “created a potentially deadly situation.”

As for Henson, he was found guilty in November of last year for two counts of conspiracy to distribute prescription drugs outside the course of medical practice; 13 counts of unlawfully distributing oxycodone; unlawfully distributing oxycodone, methadone and alprazolam; unlawfully distributing methadone and alprazolam, the use of which resulted in the death of a victim; presenting false patient records to investigators; obstruction of justice; and six counts of money laundering. In March of this year a judge sentenced him to life in prison.

16,000 Readers Shared Their Experiences of Being Told to ‘Go Back.’ Here Are Some of Their Stories.

Trump I'd say please #goback to Germany where you came from, except that's not a great thing to do to a country that has spent 70+ years trying to rid themselves of people like you.

Kathy Zhu, Miss Michigan of the Miss World America pageant, was stripped of her title over the weekend when MWA officials discovered several offensive tweets she had made.

One made the news in 2018 when the Orlando Sentinel reported that the then University of Central Florida freshman had complained about a Muslim Student Association tent that had been set up to celebrate World Hijab Day.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/vFMpCo7.png)

In another since deleted tweet Zhu said "Did you know that the majority of black deaths are caused by other blacks? Fix problems within your own community first before blaming others."

In response to being stripped of her title the 20-year-old said that she "stand(s) by each and every one of my tweets on my account," that "coming out as a conservative is way harder than coming out as gay in today's society," and that "I am very glad that I now have the opportunity to speak out about the unjust treatment of conservatives."

As of this afternoon there's no official word on when Turning Point, Fox News, or the Trump campaign will offer her a job.

Kathy Zhu wrote:

"coming out as a conservative is way harder than coming out as gay in today's society," and that "I am very glad that I now have the opportunity to speak out about the unjust treatment of conservatives."

When do folks learn that, just because you say something, that thing doesn't have merit? "Coming out as a conservative" is an absurd statement. "Coming out as an entitled racist" is closer to what she means, and "the unjust treatment of conservatives" is a pretty weak dogwhistle for "getting called out when they say offensive things".

OG_slinger wrote:

As of this afternoon there's no official word on when Turning Point, Fox News, or the Trump campaign will offer her a job.

The "unjust treatment" is that they're not given deferential treatment.

So many self-labelled "conservatives" fall under this:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/sZq4vdT.png)

It's tied up in that damn Christian persecution complex.