Clown Car V: 2020 version!

[cardgame]

How the hell do you get elected as AG after being indicted for securities fraud?

(R)

 

[Ajidica]

@cardgame
(minor language)

 

[Lexicus]

How the hell do you get elected as AG after being indicted for securities fraud?

Texas.

(R)

Also this.

 

[Sommerswerd]

How the hell do you get elected as AG after being indicted for securities fraud?

The same way you get elected POTUS after multiple bankruptcies. Murican voters don't GAF.

(R)

Well... see below

Texas.

Also this.

Meh... See Marion Barry (D) former mayor of DC

He gave the presidential nomination speech for Jesse Jackson at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. His celebrity was transformed into international notoriety in January 1990, when he was videotaped during a sting operation smoking crack cocaine and was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials on drug charges. The arrest and subsequent trial precluded Barry from seeking re-election, and he served six months in a federal prison. After his release, he was elected to the Council of the District of Columbia in 1992. He was elected again as mayor in 1994, serving from 1995 to 1999.

A long time ago... but still a head shaker.

 

[cardgame]

Drugs don't really matter to the position in the same way as fraud...

 

[Cutlass]

So does this mean Texas might eventually decide to secede on the basis of those states casting their electorate votes against Trump?

Which is actually how the Civil War started.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Moron talks math

One in a quadrillion people. One in a quadrillion. To the power of 4!!! My god, these people are so frogging dumb it hurts.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't think they couldn't. I just think they McConnell won't.

ftfy

So Trump was offered 200 million doses of the vaccine, and turned them down and only bought 100 million. Enough for 1/7th of the US. Is he just trying to take the US down in flames for rejecting him?

Trump administration refused an offer of millions of additional doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus jab.

The White House refused an offer to buy 100m additional doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, a decision which could cause delays in distribution. The Trump administration ordered an initial 100m doses, enough for 50 million Americans, from the US multinational but passing up the opportunity to buy a second batch could mean the US has to wait until Pfizer has supplied other countries before it can get further doses.
​

Meanwhile he raided the DoD budget again to the tune of $15B to finish the border wall in a rush before Jan 20th. They built illegal road into Mexico to funnel illegal immigrants laborers into Texas to build it instead of hiring Americans.

You can't make this stuff up, he's a cartoon villain.

 

[Samson]

Moron talks math

One in a quadrillion people. One in a quadrillion. To the power of 4!!! My god, these people are so frogging dumb it hurts.

I found the source of this. It gets the maths right, but makes the intentional error in assuming that the last 2 elections are random samples from the same distribution. When stated like this it is obvious why it is so wrong, and most people would be able to look at the answer and see that it is wrong. However, if you understand probability enough to play the lottery, and really want it to be true then I can see how people pick up on this.

He is obviously being intentionally obtuse because he could have said "I used the normal approximation of the binomial distribution, and tested the null hypothesis that the p is constant", but instead said this, which is less accurate:

Spoiler Total obfuscation, both in the text and that they distribute a PDF that is just a load of images :

And it gets worse. This bit is just outright lies:

As Z increases, the p values goes down a lot, BUT NOT EXPONENTIALLY!!! If it was exponential it would be easy to calculate, but it really is not. Also, any finite number is as far from infinity as any other finite number. There really is no such thing as "almost infinite". Anyone who can do this much maths must know this.

And from the top of that document, is it not illegal to lie to the SCOTUS?

Spoiler Top of document :

 

[Broken_Erika]

In his final days in office, Trump orders series of executions

As President Donald Trump's days in the White House wane, his administration is racing through a string of federal executions.

Five executions are scheduled before President-elect Joe Biden's 20 January inauguration - breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.

And if all five take place, Mr Trump will be the country's most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates since July of this year.

The five executions are to begin this week, starting with 40-year-old Brandon Bernard and 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois. They are both scheduled to be put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Attorney General William Barr has said his justice department is simply upholding existing law. But critics have said the move is concerning, coming just weeks before Mr Biden - who has said he will seek to end the death penalty - takes office.

• US resumption of federal executions criticised
• How many countries still have the death penalty?
• US inmate has 'no right to painless death'

"This is really outside the norm, in a pretty extreme way," said Ngozi Ndulue, director of research at the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center.

Here's what you need to know about President Trump's last-minute rush of executions.

What is current policy in the US?
Since the federal death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1988, federal executions in the US have remained rare.

Before Mr Trump took office, only three federal executions had taken place in this period.

All were carried out under Republican President George W Bush, and included inmate Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Since 2003, there have been no federal executions at all.

US states have continued to execute inmates in state prisons, putting a combined 22 death row inmates to death last year. But state executions are also on a downward trend.

A growing number have moved to abolish capital punishment all together, and the majority have either formally banned the practice or have not put any inmates to death in more than a decade.

Popular opinion, too, has shifted away from capital punishment. A November 2019 Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans supported life in prison over the death penalty for the first time since the survey began more than 30 years ago.

"Public support for the death penalty is at a decades-long low," Ms Ndulue said.

Further problems have emerged with the methods of execution, sourcing drugs used for lethal injections, and the costs of decades-long court battles and appeals.

What did the Trump administration do?
In July 2019, Mr Barr announced the scheduled executions of five death row prisoners, despite prevailing practices and public opinion.

"Congress has expressly authorised the death penalty," the country's top legal official said in a statement at the time. "The justice department upholds the rule of law - and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system."

The selected inmates had been convicted of murdering or raping children and the elderly, Mr Barr said.

The move drew fierce criticism from top Democrats and human rights groups.

"We feel [the death penalty] is an unconstitutionally arbitrary punishment that should have been abolished decades ago," said Lisa Cylar Barrett, director of policy at the NCAAP Legal Defense Fund.

And the particular selection of inmates fuelled charges that the decision was politically motivated.

The first set of executions this summer - during a wave of anti-racism protests and demonstrations - were all of white men. Now, four of the five prisoners scheduled to be put to death are African American.

Ms Ndulue said she didn't think it was "coincidental" that no black prisoners were scheduled for execution during a period of "enhanced awareness of the racial disparities around the federal death penalty".

Research suggests the death penalty has been enforced differently according to race.

"One of the most robust findings of study after study, in jurisdictions across the country, is that the race of your victim is a serious factor in determining whether or not you will have the death penalty," Ms Ndulue said.

What is happening now?
If the executions of Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois go ahead as scheduled the 10 inmates executed in 2020 will bring a single-year total unmatched in modern history.

"We'd have to go back to 1896 to find another year where there were 10 or more executions," Ms Ndulue said.

The Trump administration has also chosen to carry out federal executions in the midst of a political transition, with a lame-duck president, for the first time in more than a century.

Incumbent presidents have typically deferred to their predecessors, allowing presidents-elect to set the course.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Mr Barr defended the post-election executions, and said he would likely schedule more before he leaves the justice department.

"I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty," he said. "But if you ask juries to impose it, then it should be carried out."

But it is a controversial choice, especially as the incoming Biden administration has said it will work to end the death penalty.

The first scheduled execution, of Bernard, has drawn particular attention. Convicted of murder and kidnapping in 1999, Bernard was 18 years old at the time of his offense, and would be the youngest offender executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years.

Five of the nine surviving jurors in the case, as well as the US attorney who defended the death sentence on appeal, have publicly called for his execution to be stopped.

Kim Kardashian has also weighed in, making a direct appeal to Mr Trump on Twitter.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55236260

 

[Lexicus]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55236260

pro-life

 

[Gori the Grey]

Moron talks math

One in a quadrillion people. One in a quadrillion. To the power of 4!!! My god, these people are so frogging dumb it hurts.

That just tells me that God wanted Biden to be president.

(This was one of the evangelicals' arguments for supporting Trump: because his win was unlikely, it showed God must have arranged for it.)

(Wonder why that reasoning doesn't apply four years later.)

 

[Sommerswerd]

pro-life

As you well know, "Pro life" is just a slogan, not meant to be taken literally... its like "Black Lives Matter"... the focus of BLM is raising awareness of and combating police brutality and the racist disproportionately negative treatment that black people (and to a tangential extent) poor people, receive at the hands of the criminal justice system in the US. All that is, of course, a mouthful... so "Black Lives Matter" does nicely. Its also provocative, which is always good when you're trying to raise public attention to an issue. It has nothing to do with heart disease among black people or "gang violence" in black neighborhoods.

Anyway... I digress... "Pro life" has nothing to do do with the literal slogan. "Life?" Termites are life and so are mosquitoes and cockroaches. Nobody gives an eff about that life. "Pro-life" more accurately means, once a human egg is fertilized, that's a done deal, will of god, no take backsies, and/or women need to keep their legs closed if they don't want the blessing of god's majesty on their womb and stop being whores. "Pro life" has nothing to do with "life"... it just means that god and/or almighty random chance alone gets to decide what humans are born and it should be legally wrong to interfere with the birthing of humans.

 

[Kyriakos]

 

[r16]

oh , yet another glory of Trumpian diplomacy . Morocco and lsrael recognition deal . Morocco's win lays in America recognizing annexation of Western Sahara and like hurts me so much the French glory in supporting the recent Moroccan "invasion" , because Armenia was too distant and New Turkey too important , merely turns into yet another American glory !

 

[Takhisis]

How the hell do you get elected as AG after being indicted for securities fraud?

Curiously enough our glorious leaderess just wrote a public letter in which she complains about how judges are unelected.

 

[Kyriakos]

Moron talks math

One in a quadrillion people. One in a quadrillion. To the power of 4!!! My god, these people are so frogging dumb it hurts.

You can come up with such probabilities, and far worse. 1 in 1000000000000000, ie 10^-15, is easy to get if you (which I assume they did) name distinct probabilities for any number which starts at the one set as bottom end and goes to the top end. Those cases won't be themselves numbering in the trillions; any subprobability usually increases with an exponent when generalized for all, so 15 zeros can start as (eg) 5 zeros which factor in two following probabilities: 100000^3 is your quadrilion, and 1 in front would mean that (according to the - no doubt ridiculous - stat) Biden had only 1 possibility for each of that 100.000.
Given this is about votes, I suspect the first batch numbered less, and the exponent was bigger. Maybe individual parts of the state or whatever.

An example of how such probability can "stand" but has no touch with reality:
A student writes letters to 8 universities, asking to be accepted. Each case has only two answers: yes (accepted), no (not accepted). This would mean that the student has a 1 in 2^8 chances of being accepted by all universities, which is 1 in 256.
But this doesn't factor (obviously) anything about the grades of the student, the letter, recommendations, university practice etc. In reality the 1 in 256 means next to nothing, since this isn't a random chance (which the type of probability which can lead to quadrillions is).

 

[AmazonQueen]

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/poli...n-fraud-allegations/ar-BB1bQQB4?ocid=msedgdhp

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/poli...to-remain-president/ar-BB1bQLbm?ocid=msedgdhp

I think this is what it is going to be like for the next 4 years.

 

[El_Machinae]

It entered negative-sum territory quite awhile ago. I think encouraging secession of the alt-right states (plus encouraging them to take on the gold standard) is the game-winning move at this point.

 

[Birdjaguar]

SCOTUS dismisses Texas lawsuit: FU Trump!