Putting one around the witness box might have the bonus of reminding witnesses what will happen if they tell lies...

If a witness is telling the truth, then the cross examination will not achieve anything. It will show that the truth is internally consistent and coherent. It's when the witness has something to hide that it will reveal that he's been lying. The fact that the witness in this case was depending on someone else to answer the questions strongly implies that he had something to hide.

I'm hopeful that the guy will lose the case and be charged with contempt of court and attempting to pervert the course of justice. Those should generate significant prison time. Add in a mega fine and perhaps this won't happen again.

But it's not one that is really rigorous. The more common terminology for the unusual items which the IMF is including as 'subsidies' is 'market failures'. These are a very real problem, but to call them 'subsidies' is strange.

https://www.imf.org/en/topics/...

I understand their claim, but it is categorising allowing pollution as a subsidy, which is unusual, though does make sense, except for congestion.

As someone who is in favour of substantial increases in carbon pricing the link provides some good data. Thank you for pointing me to the IMF.

'Hot fusion is catastrophically under-funded (the total spent on fusion research globally in the lat 60 years is about the same as spent just on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry every three days'

Define 'subsidies'. The proper definition of 'subsidies' is direct payments from the taxpayer to the producer. I'm extremely doubtful those even exist. Or are you thinking of the capital allowances, depreciation etc., that any resource company will receive because those are the costs of doing business?

Why do I never have mod points when I REALLY need them!?

'A religion takes a collection of sacred writings as its inerrant source of facts.'

This reflects your background as only having encountered the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The other major religions are far less sacred writing oriented, whilst those of Africa have no authoritative sacred writings at all. See also Wicca...

'Science takes observations as facts, and builds testable, falsifiable models, theories, or laws from them. Whether a model, theory, or law survives depends on whether it can make accurate predictions or explanations of other observations. If it can't, then it is discarded. No faith or belief involved.'

Overall evolution is running out of explanation for the ever larger facts that are challenging its claims. The most obvious of these are the irreducible complexity of many biological mechanisms that make their spontaneous emergence an unreasonably unlikely event; a lot of the time the evolutionist position comes down to: 'of course it must have been evolution because I refuse to consider the alternative'. THAT is a faith statement ;)

https://www.icr.org/content/fo...

I agree that those categories of labelling have been accepted, but the press gets special treatment!

Thank you. Got a source for that?

The 1st Amendment prevents the abridging of the freedom of the press. Within that freedom is the choice of how to generate the material it puts on its pages and how to label it. That freedom also gives it the right to say whatever it likes and only to be held liable for severe defamation. In that context the bill is surely unconstitutional.

The problem here, of course, is that the freedom of the press is based on the assumption that journalists and editors can be expected to do the right thing. This has been totally disproved again and again, from the days of William Hurst onwards. However the protection remains, rendering this bill illegitimate.

The other half of the problem is that the motivation is to prevent the loss of jobs in the newspaper industry. The attempt to do this via government action is even less proper.

That nice Mr Epstein... he can only have trafficked a few hundred girls out of the millions in the world, so why get upset about it?

The fact that when presented with a substance that may improve your depression it does, doesn't prove that using coffee will have the same effect when not presented as a placebo. The body expects something to improve, and it does, but only when it's consumed with the medical trappings.

This seems to be why homeopathy makes a real difference to some patients, despite there being nothing in the liquid actually prescribed and consumed. The body responds to the medical trappings - and heals itself a bit, or sometimes quite a lot. This really annoys a lot of people, because don't like the mumbo jumbo that homeopathy practitioners offer to explain their 'medicine'. The ethical fundamentalists claim that this is deception. But it works...

Beech umbrellas
Ice cream sellers...