Zoraptor

Pretty much. Did Trump even say he would release his tax returns at all- which isn't required, it's just convention- or has he just refused to? I know that Hillary said she'd release her speech transcripts once everyone else did. That seems a bit unreasonable- I presume that Trump will endorse Republican candidates as well, some of whom will be white running against minorities; and despite his well documented 'problems' with minorities. That wouldn't be racism either and he shouldn't refrain from doing it. Seems pretty obvious how they'll deal with wikileaks and Wasserman-Schultz, by dropping her and saying that everything is now fine and would all you Sandernistas kindly vote for Hillary now (or are you still all misogynists?). In particular CNN (etc) shouldn't really be an issue for the Democratic Party- though the anti Bernie bias part of it is- as it's more an issue for the media involved. Influencing the media is an essential part of both parties' job since it is essentially just marketing; it's the media who are supposed to refuse to be influenced. I'd put it in the same boat as 'bought' reviews of games. It's not EA or Bethesda's fault if journalists are influenced by them, it's their job to get good reviews and sell their product. It is, however, the journalists' job to be impartial despite attempts to influence them.

Running amok doesn't mean no premeditation in english either. You could quite easily and accurately describe something like Columbine which was extensively planned as two kids running amok, though that would tend to be seen as a rather trivial description.

Emails are pretty lol, as always when you have supposed 'tin foil conspiracy theories' that turn out to be accurate. There's no media collusion, the rules are fair and applied fairly, the DNC doesn't care who wins, no donors' important details were lost. Yeah right. Hope they get around to leaking Hillary's emails as well.

Only die hard BernieBros living in the past care about wikileaks, which is run by a rapist, is a front for Russia, killed dozens of americans, is used by traitors and released peoples' SSN and credit card numbers. Which were stored in plain text on an easy to hack server but that's beside the point. Also, why do you hate women, freedom and puppy dogs, Barty? But seriously, the number of replies similar to that that I've seen from Hillbots/ CTR types, well, if I had a dollar for each time I'd probably have ~6.2 million $ over the year to date. I was also a bit surprised to hear in the radio that Tim Cain has been named Hillary's VP, though I had a slight suspicion it was someone with a similar name.

There's a video of a guy on the roof of a parking garage shouting "ich bin deutche" and "I am German" (which mean the same thing of course, but he yelled both). It's on Al Jazeera at least, and independently audible. Doesn't mean anything absolute at the moment, but none of it sounded typical jihadi.

Ireland is a notorious 'exporter' for purposes of tax dodging. Coincidentally, we import ~4 times as much as we export to Ireland and our largest import from Ireland is, hmm, Crude Oil. I know that's what I think of when I think of Ireland; its clean green windswept landscape oil reserves and derricks.

Such incidents are rare in other OECD countries. On a per million pop basis it isn't a pretty sight for the US- 0.15 here, slightly less similar in Australia, Germany ~0.05, UK it's below statistical accuracy. US though is above 3. So around 20x higher than Aus/ NZ. None of those other countries have unrestricted public access to firearms and police in the UK and NZ are habitually unarmed while it varies by jurisdiction in Germany/ Australia. By way of comparison murder rate by firearm are broadly comparable to those of fatal cop shootings, US is about 20x higher than Aus/ NZ. A large number of those shot by Australian/ New Zealand police are mentally ill though.

Saw/ listened to some of Trump's speech. Was... OK. Did some obvious good stuff like play on Hillary's really stupid slogan ("I'm with her" -> "I'm with you"; such an obvious rephrasing but you still have to hit the weak lobs) and proclaimed himself defender of the LGBTQ community in the face of muslim extremism, which got a surprisingly large cheer and probably his best unscripted follow up remark too. Quite a lot of Trumpisms despite it being scripted. Lots of how terrible Hillary is too, of course. Mentioned Sanders fairly positively at least once as well. It was long though, must have been well over an hour since I had an hour long drive in the middle of it and there was still at least 15 minutes left once I'd finished; so I wouldn't recommend actually watching it.

I think the meme is that Putin wants to be Tsar himself rather than restore the Romanovs. I doubt he's particularly serious about any restoration, but monarchist groups in various european states tend towards the revanchist/ traditionalist model which Putin associates himself with, along with groups like the Orthodox Church. Russian monarchists would be natural Putin supporters. Plus a royal family is great for pomp and distractions, and not that expensive if you have to maintain a bunch of palaces anyway.

You are grossly mistaken if you think Trump is taking a backseat to Pence, or would take a backseat to anyone for that matter. Allegedly he made such an offer to Kasich where he'd be a backseat 'Chairman of the Board' President to Kasich's 'Chief Executive' VP. Whether it's actually true or not who knows, but Kasich would be a better choice than Pence and is in a critical state that Trump pretty much has to win. Withholding the Republican infrastructure there would asterisk Trump over, badly, so the offer is at least plausible.

TRIGGERED.

Bush (and Kasich/ Romney) have pretty much shut up, at this point at least. I know there's talk of Bush/ Romney endorsing Johnson but at present that's talk only, and they aren't making speeches at the convention. Ironically, Cruz may have done a lot more for Trump by not endorsing him. And a Bush endorsement would hardly be an unequivocal benefit either.

Farsnews is OK, at least in these circumstances- I don't believe the details of the report without corroboration (which won't come) but I'd strongly suspect that they genuinely were given that information. Iran doesn't really benefit from making it up while it's a source that will be discredited automatically in the west but reported in Russia. Best of both worlds since it further repairs relations with Russia- along with all the throwing of the F16 pilots under the bus, not quite literally*- and won't impact relations with the west too much. I'd say that Putin likes leaders who can be manipulated or who stay out of his way. I suspect he's pretty agnostic towards actual corruption elsewhere except insofar as it means that that leader can be bought/ influenced. I'm not sure that Erdogan falls into either of those categories as he's too unpredictable and far too emotional- but at least he's unpredictable and overly emotional to everyone, including his supposed western partners. *Which is, of course, a load of opportunistic bollocks. Davitoglu and Erdogan were pretty explicit about ordering the shoot down, back when they were beating their nationalist chests at Russia instead of domestic opposition.

Russia alerts Turkey to coup? Possible, I guess, but doesn't seem likely. PR seems far more likely, much like the reports that the pilots who shot down the Russian Su24 were coup plotters and killed (at first)/ arrested. Having said that, Turkey has cut off support for one of their two most direct proxies in Syria (and even did so a few days before they decided to show how moderate they were by decapitating a 10 year old on camera) so there's definitely some quid pro quo going on. And of course anything that potentially weakens ties to either NATO or the EU is in Russia's interests, and there's no one with as much ability to alienate others as Erdy especially when he's full of righteous fury. He's managed to alienate... everyone except Qatar at some point over the past few years. He even had a fight with Saudi over Morsi and their sponsored coup in Egypt let alone his fights with Merkel, Netanyahu, Putin, Assad etc.

Turkey was never going to get into the EU anyway. If they couldn't get in with the moderate secular CHP* in power they certainly won't with a wannabe Sultan religious nutbar in power. Recep Tayyip Erdogollum certainly knows that, hence the strongarming to get EU lite concessions like visa free travel over the refugee crisis. EU is the dangling carrot, but the donkey has got wise. Kind of lol though that there are people (eg Kerry) openly insinuating that Turkey could be kicked out of NATO. In one sense not before time but everyone knows that ain't going to happen either. *I literally cannot write that acronym without the theme to CHiPs going off in my head. Aleppo, Syria. Red = government, green = rebels, yellow = kurds. The last route into the rebel areas of urban Aleppo at left of map, Castello Rd, is now cut as of about a day ago. Why oby didn't just say that who knows. Ironically Oby's image comes from a notoriously pro rebel source that also hosts perhaps the most anti Russian 'analysis' of Ukraine in existence.

That's a pretty safe bet- the recent BBC Robin Hood was not great. It had some lol SJW tropes such as Tuck being black, the Nasir (? too long since I saw 80s RH) equivalent was an arab girl and the lead was just too weedy to be convincing; but they weren't actually the worst thing about it. On the other hand, Keith Allan as the sheriff was inspired in his scenery chewing (not quite as awesome as he was in 'Bodies', but close) and while Richard Armitage wasn't as good as previous Guy he did a good job.

That's seems unlikely to help. You'd presumably still have the manipulatable local control just with additional state/ federal layers on top and you'd still have a culture that protects 'bad' cops at the ground level. A national and genuinely independent police complaints investigation authority seems like a far better idea, along with mandated body cams and the like. The first tackles the problem that you often have other cops andor prosecutors who have to work with them regularly investigating their colleagues or those they want to be innocent/ not prosecute while the second provides a proper and at least theoretically impartial record of what actually happened.

You can force vsync on in your video card's control panel if you want it on. That works fine.

Moderate is just a relative term. Moderate islam doesn't exist in the sense that there's a sect called 'moderate islam' any more than moderate christianity exists in the same sense as catholicism or greek orthodox exists. But moderate islam certainly exists in the sense that it's moderate compared to ISIS takfirism or Saudi Wahhabism. The real problem with Islam is the same as the real problem with Christianity, you can interpret it however you want to justify whatever you want then pat yourself on the back for being morally correct too. While Erdogan is taking advantage of it- it's more than just suspicious when you're dismissing as many judges as you have arrested soldiers following a coup attempt, there was clearly a list of wrong thinkers drawn up waiting for an opportunity to be used- there's very very little to no chance that the coup itself was a set up. If there's anything everyone agrees with about Erdogan it's that he's an egotist and there was far too much stuff happening that damaged his image, even just the fact that a coup was attempted damages it. If it was a set up he wouldn't be using facebook to try to address the nation etc. He just plain isn't that pragmatic; quite the reverse he's made a multitude of errors based on emotion and ego.

If you're going to go for a coup you've got to be prepared to be ruthless about it because you can bet the other side will be if you're not. That's what the Egyptian military did when deposing Morsi, and it worked. If you're not prepared to really go through with it then you're better off not doing it at all. And doing it requires, basically, both the will and a proper plan to decapitate the government both figuratively and if necessary, literally. They're not necessarily the same people. Most foreign people want Erdogan gone whether or not they're pro Assad. And publicly at least the big anti Assad players all came out for Erdogan.

There weren't kamikaze at Pearl Harbour, the closest is some of the midget submariners who weren't expected to be able to return. If Al Qaeda/ ISIS had done it there would have been. On the individual level? The average Japanese would just know their own cultural norms, and that's all. On that level their extremism is understandable and rational, so not a sign of mental illness. You certainly cannot say the same for the average western muslim terrorist though, if anything it's 'cultural shock'/ rebellion against societal norms rather than their adherence which is the breaking point for them- and when it comes right down to it it's deviation from societal norms which is usually a sing of mental illness, not adherence to them. I wouldn't necessarily say that all muslim terrorists in the west are mentally ill, much as I wouldn't say the average burglar suffers from kleptomania rather than just being a self entitled dong, but I'd bet that most would be if you could test them. And when it comes right down to it that burglar isn't likely to blow themselves up while nicking your telly.

There's clearly a mental health issue there. These people are generally committing suicide as well as killing people, which is seldom a sign of mental stability in the young and healthy.

My logic is that if a group hasn't appeared to support Erdogan through force of arms at this stage, its less likely (practically impossible) to appear with each passing hour. Would we know if there was? If units on the Syrian border, say, were loyal to Erdogan it would take them a long time to get to Ankara let alone Istanbul. And any fighting would likely take place in army bases or rural areas and not be reported by the state media which is controlled by the coup forces. With much of social media not working there's plenty of scope for fighting or loyalist troops to be around and for us to simply not know. After all, it's in the coup's best interests to minimise coverage of any resistance so as to discourage any others who are thinking of resisting either in the civilian populace or military/ police/ intelligence. Also while we may dislike the AKP and Erdogan it has to be remembered that he genuinely, regularly, won elections with actual majorities and not just pluralities. There are a lot of Turks who like him every bit as much as there are a lot of external and internal people who dislike him.

'Holier than thou' implies religion and uppity implies class aspiration; I prefer the more neutral 'smug and self important', ta muchly. Anyone over 30 here remembers that the only terrorism we've had was from the French Government, which makes the usual narrative far more difficult to sustain.

Doesn't look like they've nabbed either Erdogan or his PM though. That really should have been the first step if they wanted to succeed or not end up with different army groups fighting each other. It is kind of ironic that a military coup probably would increase Turkey's chances of EU accession.