But if Obama was born in another country an American mother he wouldn't meet the criteria?

Possibly though I'll hand it to Apple that they've had a fairly decent track record in figuring out products that people will actually use.

Outside of a fancy running watch I'm not sure what a smart watch is good for, then again I wasn't sure what a tablet was good for either.

Silly me, I tend to base my viewing decisions on whether a particular show is good or not, whether the "right" people share my particular taste is irrelevant.

By taking pride in not seeing a single episode you're not celebrating refined taste, you're celebrating ignorance.

Did that argument sound convincing while you were writing it because it sure as hell isn't convincing reading it.

There is a massive difference between an ad created by the candidate's team, starring the candidate, and explicitly approved by the candidate, and a rumour started by self-declared supporters of the candidate.

How?

That's plausible, I don't know what criticism you've actually received or what you said to trigger it.

My only point is that there's a lot of racist criticism of Obama and there will be sexist criticism of Hillary. Even if you're not doing it consciously you can be caught if you're unaware of the origin of the criticisms you make.

Incorrect.

It was Hillary Clinton supporters who created the rumour, "camp" implies that it was started by people acting under her direction, I'm not aware of any evidence to that effect.

Either way the right is where it actually took hold which is an important distinction. For a comparable issue look at Mitt Romney's Mormonism, that started as a controversy on the right, and when the general election came around it mostly went away. There was still media chatter but very few people on the left actually cared and no one on the right wanted to turn on their own candidate.

Frankly the number of people talking about Cruz's eligibility are a tiny subset of those who did it for Obama, and I suspect that most of those are just doing it so they don't get called hypocrites.

Remember the years of birther nonsense over Obama's birth certificate, conspiracy theories that he was ineligible because he was supposedly born outside the US or a dual citizen at some point? Notice the deafening silence over Ted Cruz's eligibility for whom both of those apparently disqualifying things are established fact?

What do you think the basis is for all those claims that he hates America, or he's a closet Muslim doing mischievous Muslim things, or the obsession with including his middle name "Hussein"? There's a really obvious "he's not one of us" subtext to the whole thing.

I've heard a lot of criticism of Obama across many issues where I never thought there was a racial motive for a second, same thing with Hillary and gender.

But there's also a lot of criticism of Obama that's either openly racist or wailing on dog whistles, and the people making those statements are still welcomed in the Republican party and even show up on Fox News.

If people consistently think your criticism has racial overtones then I'm tempted to suggest they may be right.

It's a big budget Hollywood film, popular opinion isn't necessarily correlated to quality.

There's nothing worse than seeming to be one of the uneducated masses, if all the cool people decides that X is terrible then saying you like it just tells people you have poor taste.

For what it's worth I saw the apparently bad theatrical release and I recall enjoying it, then again I might have terrible taste in movies.

Part of my gut says budget, I suspect they have a small budget and I honestly feel a lot of screen action is ruined by a big budget. The more money you get, the more fancy stuff you throw in, and the less you can empathize with what's happening to the characters.

I truly find a lot of action films boring, when I see a guy who can defy the laws of physics get punched it's hard for me to empathize. But if I see a guy who's just a really good athlete get thrown into a wall I can actually relate to how that feels.

The other part is whatever random assortment of actors and writers they threw together is actually working really well, I even enjoyed the lame "lets show the character's personal lives so we can let the actors emote and be all actory" scenes.

So in the article the authors stated the following:

“The effects we find are large, consistent and statistically very significant,” Marie told the Observer. “For example, we estimate that students who were no longer able to buy cannabis legally were 5% more likely to pass courses. The grade improvement this represents is about the same as having a qualified teacher and, more relevantly, similar to decreases in grades observed from reaching legal drinking age in the US.”

For low performers, there was a larger effect on grades. They had a 7.6% better chance of passing their courses.

Note that they don't seem to be saying that pot smokers in specific are affected, but rather that any student who was legally barred from buying pot got a 5% better chance of passing. I can't imagine the total number of students who were buying legal pot before and stopped buying after was very large.

Note they got their study populations by looking at a city where they banned most foreign students from buying pot for several years:

Economists Olivier Marie of Maastricht University and Ulf Zölitz of IZA Bonn examined what happened in Maastricht in 2011 when the Dutch city allowed only Dutch, German and Belgian passport-holders access to the 13 coffee shops where cannabis was sold. The temporary restrictions were introduced because of fears that nationals from other countries, chiefly France and Luxembourg, were visiting the city simply to smoke drugs, which would tarnish its genteel image.

After studying data on more than 54,000 course grades achieved by students from around the world who were enrolled at Maastricht University before and after the restrictions were introduced

So I looked around and I think I found the paper here. I haven't digested it but there's a table on page 33 that shows the average grade change over the study period. There's two things that strike me about this table.

First there's not a lot of data to convince me that big divergences in grades by nationality are abnormal. For all we know secondary factors cause quirks like this all the time.

Second, half way through the prohibition period the grades of the DGB students who can buy pot starts shooting up. By the end of the prohibition they're actually doing better relative to the non-DGB students then they were before prohibition!

Maybe they're onto something, but of the stuff I've seen I'm still really skeptical.

Half right. He expressed the desire, but it was the FBI who prompted him to go through the motions.

Possibly.

We don't know that he had genuine intent before the FBI intervened because he was all talk at that point.

I forgot to mention in my original response that I don't think for a moment a US court would rule this as entrapment.

However, I do think you're significantly underestimating the degree of influence the FBI may have had. This was a very troubled person and was obviously very susceptible for being recruited into being a jihadist.

However, that in itself isn't a crime, planning or committing a terror plot is a crime, and when the FBI is the one supplying the crime and the prompt I find that problematic. They've taken him an at-risk individual and turned him into a terrorist, I think there were better ways to handle it.

No it isn't. Entrapment is getting you to do something you wouldn't have done otherwise.

In this case the FBI recruited Booker, planned the plot, and then gave him the materials to carry out the plot.

Now this kid obviously has some serious issues, he was basically asking for an ISIS recruiter to come along and find him, if one didn't come along there is a possibility he would have eventually committed a lone attack on his own.

That being said he also might have grown out of it, either way I suspect that both Booker and society would have been much better served with some court mandated counselling. The major justification for this operation is the FBI showing they can thwart a major terrorist operation by thwarting their own operation (though they're also hopefully making it more difficult for actual recruiters).

Many discussions reach a sort of general consensus, that consensus is the opinion to which I refer.